Fourth dimension in art

aesthetic c. 1884-1960 France Europe

In the first half of the twentieth century the idea of a fourth dimension - a space beyond the three we see - became a powerful prompt for artists. Popularized by writers such as Charles Howard Hinton and, in Paris, by Maurice Princet, who showed the Cubists Esprit Jouffret's diagrams of hypercubes projected onto the page, it suggested that painting need not imitate a single viewpoint. Picasso's Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910) and the theorizing of Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes in Du Cubisme grew from this climate, and Marcel Duchamp spent a decade on the Large Glass and his Nude Descending a Staircase. After Einstein, the fourth dimension became time as much as space. The 1936 Dimensionist Manifesto called for art's "conquest" of four-dimensional space, and Salvador Dalí painted Christ on a hypercube cross in 1954.

illustration from Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions by Esprit Jouffret (page 153)
illustration from Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions by Esprit Jouffret (page 153)Public domain (credit: Esprit Jouffret) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Multiple viewpoints and simultaneity: several sides of a subject shown at once
  • Forms unfolded or projected like hypercube nets and geometric diagrams
  • Fragmented planes dissolving solid bodies into overlapping volumes
  • Transparent, interpenetrating forms suggesting space beyond three dimensions
  • Motion rendered as temporal slices - time as the fourth dimension after Einstein
  • Mathematical diagrams echoed directly in composition

Key figures

  • Charles Howard Hinton (1854-1907) — Mathematician whose fourth-dimension writings seeded the idea in art
  • Maurice Princet (1871-1973) — The 'mathematician of cubism' who introduced higher geometry to Picasso's circle
  • Jean Metzinger (1883-1956) — Cubist theorist of non-Euclidean space in Du Cubisme (1912)
  • Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) — Explored four-dimensional motion in Nude Descending a Staircase and the Large Glass
  • Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) — Painted the hypercubic Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) in 1954

Example works

Sources

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