Modern Art and Science 1900-40: From the Ether and a Spatial Fourth Dimension (1900-20) to Einstein and Space-Time (1920s-40s)
- Linda Dalrymple Henderson
- 1 day ago
- 32 min read
In a 1967 interview, Marcel Duchamp, one of the key figures of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and an artist who drew extensively on contemporary science, declared that ‘the public always needs a banner; whether it be Picasso, Einstein, or some other’.[1] In naming these individuals, Duchamp was responding to the emergence during the 1940s-60s of the popular perception of Picasso and Einstein as the archetypal modern artist and scientist of the twentieth century. Picasso’s Cubism and Einstein’s Relativity Theory had first been linked in the early 1940s and that fallacious association continued to figure in discussions of the style well into the 1980s and, occasionally, beyond. In 1943, for example, Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr had claimed in his highly influential primer What is Modern Painting? that the ‘introduction of a time element into an art usually considered in terms of two- or three-dimensional space suggests some relationship to Einstein’s theory of relativity in which time is thought of mathematically as a fourth dimension’.[2] Barr was seeking to explain the multiple viewpoints in Cubist paintings, such as Picasso’s 1910 Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (fig 1) or his 1932 Girl Before a Mirror (fig 10), and here he echoed the first major source to promulgate the supposed Cubism-Relativity connection, Sigfried Giedion’s 1941 Space, Time and Architecture. For Giedion, Barr, and those who followed them, connecting modern architecture or Picasso’s Cubism to Einstein was a means to validate new and unfamiliar forms of artistic expression for a sceptical public.[3]
What disturbed Duchamp in 1967 and should trouble anyone interested in the cultural history of modernism was this trope’s oversimplification of a complex art world (made up of a variety of artists, including Duchamp himself) and its ahistorical characterization of the physical science known to the general public in the years before and during World War I. In France, for example, Einstein and his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity were barely noticed and, even then, only in a few scientific journals. Only in 1919 would Einstein be catapulted to world celebrity, when a November 1919 eclipse expedition confirmed the bending of light rays by the mass of the sun, as predicted in his 1916 General Theory of Relativity.[4] Instead of Einstein and Relativity, in the prewar and wartime years the attention of the general public was focused on a series of developments from the mid-1890s onward that had transformed contemporary conceptions of matter and space. Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of the X-ray (1895), Sir JJ Thomson’s identification of the electron (1897), Marie and Pierre Curie’s isolation of radioactive elements (1898), Ernest Rutherford’s subsequent work on the structure of the atom, and the emergence of wireless telegraphy via the electromagnetic waves Heinrich Hertz had identified in 1887—all pointed to an invisible reality beyond the reach of sense perception. Science in this period was not distant from daily life, since its applications, such as medical X-rays and wireless telegraphy, were radically transforming modes of seeing and communicating. Rather than Einstein or Hermann Minkowski, the architect of Relativity’s 1908 space-time continuum, the scientific heroes of pre-World War I France, for example, were Henri Poincaré, the Curies, Jean Perrin, and scientific popularizer Gustave Le Bon. From abroad, names such as Röntgen, Rutherford, Tesla, Sir William Crookes, and Sir Oliver Lodge—rather than Einstein—appeared regularly in popular coverage of physics.[5]
In addition to the specific discoveries that captured the popular imagination in the prewar era, two other concepts were central to the public’s altered conception of the nature of reality in the first two decades of the century. First was the ether of space, which was understood to suffuse all space and matter, serving as the necessary medium for visible light and the various invisible vibrating electromagnetic waves that now fascinated the public. What was new about the ether in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century was the considerable expansion of its hypothetical functions. While Lord Kelvin in the 1860s had proposed that atoms might be whirling vortices of ether, at the end of the century Joseph Larmor and Oliver Lodge propounded the ‘electric theory of matter’, grounded in the newly identified electron and its interaction with the ether.[6] Lodge also celebrated the ether as the fundamental source of continuity in the universe, quoting Maxwell’s assertion that ‘no human power can remove [the ether] from the smallest portion of space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity’.[7] Hopes were high for the ether among scientists and occultists alike. Sir William Crookes declared in his 1898 presidential address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science that ‘ether vibrations have powers and attributes equal to any demand—even to the transmission of thought’.[8]
The second issue characteristic of the early twentieth-century worldview was the widespread belief in the possible existence of a suprasensible fourth dimension of space. If such a dimension existed, our familiar world might then be merely a three-dimensional section of it, akin to the shadow world in Plato’s allegory of the cave. The highly popular ‘Fourth Dimension’ was an outgrowth of the formulation of n-dimensional geometry earlier in the nineteenth century.[9] Following its initial popularization in the 1870s and 1880s in sources such as EA Abbott’s Flatland of 1884, the fourth dimension quickly took on multiple philosophical and mystical / occult significations as well. Higher dimensions could also be linked to the ether, as in the theories of Balfour Stewart and PG Tait, along with the British hyperspace philosopher Charles Howard Hinton. Stewart and Tait argued in the revised 1876 edition of their book The Unseen Universe that the three-dimensional world might be ‘merely the skin or boundary of an Unseen whose matter has four dimensions’ with the ether as a bridge between them.[10] Hinton proposed that electrical current might be created by particles of ether in four-dimensional rotation.[11]
Both the ether and the spatial fourth dimension—central themes in early modernism—were largely displaced by the popularization of Relativity Theory after the November 1919 eclipse. Just as Einstein in 1905 dismissed the ether as having no mechanical properties and hence unnecessary to his theory, Minkowski’s four-dimensional space-time continuum of 1908 posited time instead of space as the fourth dimension.[12] By the 1930s and 1940s, the ‘space-time’ world of Einstein had triumphed in popular culture: a temporal fourth dimension reigned and the ether, the prior sign of universal continuity, had largely faded from view. However, as discussed below, the ether did not go easily—and the spatial fourth dimension survived underground to emerge gradually in the second half of the century and reach its current prominence in string theory, computer graphics, and popular culture more broadly.[13]
The year 1920, then, stands as a watershed between an early modernist phase in art and literature and a quite separate postwar milieu, in which Relativity Theory and space-time did indeed become major cultural determinants. This essay examines these two phases of artistic response to contemporary science—recovering the place of ether physics and the spatial fourth dimension in the first phase and sampling artists’ reactions to the new world of Einsteinian space-time during the 1920s through 1940s, particularly that of American painter Stuart Davis. Fundamental to this discussion is the contrast between the pre-World War I Cubist style of Picasso and Georges Braque (fig 1) and the later, very different variation on their subsequent planar-oriented Synthetic Cubist style made by Davis in the 1930s-1940s in direct response to the popularization of Relativity Theory (eg his Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors of 1940, fig 14). As a complement to early Cubism, the essay also considers briefly three other artists of the prewar / wartime period: Duchamp (the modern artist most engaged with science), the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and Russian-born Expressionist Wassily Kandinsky—all three of whose writings provide crucial evidence of the kinds of science that stimulated early twentieth-century artistic invention. Before considering Davis’s Cubism in the post-1919 era, the essay briefly addresses alternative artistic responses to Relativity Theory, ranging from kinetic art to the paintings of Salvador Dali.
1900-20: ‘The Fourth Dimension’ and the Ether of Space
Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler exemplifies the style known as Analytical Cubism, which he developed in Paris, working along with Braque, between 1909 and 1912. Here the geometrical faceting of the seated figure suggests a more complex reality beyond immediate perception, and the interpenetration of figure and space makes it impossible to read the image as three-dimensional. Although the stylistic roots of Picasso’s Cubism lie in Cézanne and African art, his move beyond the solid volumes of Cézanne he was still exploring into 1909 would have been encouraged by the contemporary fascination with the possible existence of an invisible fourth dimension of space. Picasso later described his goal as ‘paint[ing] objects as I think them, not as I see them’,[14] and his friend the critic Guillaume Apollinaire found in the fourth dimension a specific rationale for the Cubist artist’s freedom to reject three-dimensional perspective and to reconfigure objects according to a higher law. ‘It is to the fourth dimension alone that we owe a new norm of the perfect’, Apollinaire declared in his 1913 volume Les Peintres Cubistes.[15] The insurance actuary Maurice Princet, who was a member of Picasso’s circle, is thought to have shared with him the pioneering geometrical diagrams in Esprit Jouffret’s 1903 treatise on four-dimensional geometry (fig 2).[16] In both Picasso’s monochromatic painting and the Jouffret drawing, the image is opened up and its complexity suggested by means of multiple partially shaded angular facets that fluctuate in an indeterminate space.
If there is a sense of time and process here, as Barr suggested, time is not the goal, but only the means to gather information about higher dimensional space—just as Poincaré in his 1902 Science and Hypothesis had suggested that one might represent a four-dimensional object by combining multiple perspectives of it.[17] We know that Jean Metzinger and his co-author Albert Gleizes drew directly on Poincaré’s writings about perception using senses other than vision, ie tactile and motor sensations, and they and others were undoubtedly encouraged by Poincaré’s bold prediction that ‘motor space would have as many dimensions as we have muscles’.[18] Indeed, in Cubist theory, vision is deliberately downplayed in favour of other sensations, such as touch and muscular movement, and conception is clearly privileged over perception.
There was a strong impetus for early twentieth-century artists to downgrade both vision and visible light in this period: Röntgen’s discovery of the X-ray (fig 3).[19] X-rays had demonstrated definitively the inadequacy of the human eye, which detects only a small fraction (ie visible light) of the much larger spectrum of vibrating electromagnetic waves then being defined. Indeed, the spatial fourth dimension might well have remained the province of philosophical idealists and occultists but for this discovery, which made it impossible to deny the existence of an invisible reality simply because it could not be seen. In Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler—on the model of the X-ray—matter becomes transparent as the artist penetrates the skin to reveal the figure’s substructure. There is also an unprecedented fluidity between figure and ground, with the figure’s contour dissolving like the flesh in an X-ray.
The interpenetration of matter and space in Picasso’s painting would also have been supported in this period by widespread popular discussion of radioactivity, as well as the ether. In contrast to the traditional image of matter as stable and constant, radioactive substances emitted particles, suggesting a vibrating realm of atomic matter in the process of transformation. In his best-selling books, such as L’Evolution de la matière (1905), Le Bon argued that all substances were radioactive and that matter was dematerializing into the ether-filled space around it by means of its radioactive discharges.[20] Le Bon was a friend of the philosopher Henri Bergson, a figure important for Cubists as well as Futurists, and both men’s world views were, in fact, grounded in ether physics.[21] Bergson cited Michael Faraday and Lord Kelvin in his 1896 book Matière et mémoire, and there—as well as in his 1907 L’Evolution Créatrice—he argued that the essence of reality was flux.[22] Bergson’s heading for one section of Matière et mémoire—‘All division of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined outlines is an artificial division’—would have been highly suggestive for artists. The same is true for his remarkable assertion later in that chapter, that ‘matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body’.[23]
In addition to their X-ray-like transparency and fluidity, Picasso’s prewar Analytical Cubist paintings, with their surfaces activated by shimmering Neo-Impressionist brushstrokes, suggest an ethereal realm of continuous cohesion and diffusion as evoked in the writings of Le Bon and Bergson. Matter and space of whatever dimensionality are here reconceived as degrees on a continuum. Picasso need not have read Le Bon’s best-selling books himself, since his close compatriot Apollinaire owned a 1908 edition of L’Evolution de la matière—along with such books as Commandant Louis Darget’s text on photographing invisible fluids and ‘V-rays’ as well as a personally inscribed copy of Gaston Danville’s 1908 study, Magnétisme et spiritisme.[24] Like the fourth dimension, the ether was a concept on which the interests of science and occultism converged in this period—as in the regularly drawn links between telegraphy and telepathy or electromagnetism and the still-extant practice of animal magnetism. Picasso’s photography in this era documents his cultivation of unusual photographic effects, suggestive of invisible phenomena. And in comments decades later about the nature of the ‘reality’ in his Analytical Cubist paintings, he resorted to terms such as ‘smoke’ and ‘perfume’, two of the numerous metaphors for the immaterial ether.[25]
In most cultural histories of the twentieth century, the ether of space barely survives to the end of the first decade of the century. If not banished by the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment’s failure to detect an ‘ether wind’ resulting from the earth’s motion, the ether is said to have died in 1905 with Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. But the story is not that simple. As is suggested by active publishing on the ether by Lodge and others through the 1920s, the ether hardly disappeared in 1905. Not only did the general public not hear of Einstein’s theories until 1919, the question of the ether’s existence was hotly debated among scientists sceptical of Einstein’s theories during the 1910s and 1920s, with passionate defences of the concept published in both scientific and popular literature.[26] Reflecting the mood of the ether’s adherents, Sir Thomson declared in his Presidential Address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1909 that ‘the ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher; it is as essential to us as the air we breathe. […] The study of this all-pervading substance is perhaps the most fascinating duty of the physicist’.[27]
Recovering the ether’s centrality to early twentieth-century conceptions of reality is a much-needed step for cultural historians to take. Set against the backdrop of the ether, the art of both Boccioni and Kandinsky—like Picasso’s Cubism—gains new coherence and meaning. Boccioni’s 1912 painting Matter (fig 5) and his 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (fig 4) both demonstrate his firm belief that ‘what needs to be painted is not the visible but what has heretofore been held to be invisible, that is, what the clairvoyant painter sees’.[28] Unlike the taciturn Picasso, Boccioni wrote extensively about his artistic goals and referred specifically to the ‘electric theory of matter’ and the ether, from both scientific and occult points of view, as his reference to clairvoyance suggests.[29] Virtually unknown to historians is the fact that Boccioni’s greatest sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913, is an homage to the ‘infinite continuity’ of the invisible ether. As the end of his 1913 treatise Pittura scultura futuriste, Boccioni finally reveals his goal as the ‘materialization of the ethereal fluid, the imponderable’, declaring that ‘we want to model the atmosphere, to denote the forces of objects, […] the unique form of continuity in space’.[30] With its striking effect of ‘ether drag’, Boccioni’s dynamic striding figure manages to defy the fixed boundaries of a three-dimensional, sculptural object.
In his painting Matter Boccioni, a confirmed Bergsonist, explores simultaneously the process of particulate dematerialization (like Picasso) and the materialization of form from the vibrating ether-filled space around his mother. Boccioni’s painting is a graphic demonstration of the widely held view of the ether expressed by popular science writer Robert Kennedy Duncan in his 1905 book The New Knowledge: ‘Not only through interstellar spaces, but through the world […] [and] through our own bodies; all lie not only encompassed in it but soaking in it as a sponge lies soaked in water. How much we ourselves are matter and how much ether is, in these days, a very moot question’.[31] Boccioni believed that ‘solid bodies are only atmosphere condensed’[32] and explained in 1913 that ‘it should be clear, then, why an infinity of lines and currents emanate from our objects, making them live in an environment which has been created by their vibrations’.[33]
I have elsewhere termed this phase of early twentieth-century art ‘vibratory modernism’, and ethereal vibrations were also central for Kandinsky and Duchamp as well as for avant-garde writers from FT Marinetti to Ezra Pound.[34] Like Boccioni, in his 1911 treatise On the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky cited the ‘electron theory—i.e., the theory of moving electricity, which is supposed completely to replace matter’ and considered the ‘dissolution of matter’ to be imminent.[35] In Kandinsky’s view, the time had come for spiritual qualities to replace material objects in a new type of totally abstract composition of colour and form, such as his Composition VII of 1913 (fig 6). Kandinsky’s goal for his paintings was to set up a sympathetic vibration or Klang in the soul of the viewer. He drew vital support for his theories not only from music and synaesthesia, but also from the widely discussed analogy between wireless telegraphy and telepathy in this period. Having lived on the outskirts of Paris for a year during 1906-7, Kandinsky encountered the active French interest in the ether and its vibrations in the writings of figures such as Camille Flammarion, Hippolyte Baraduc, Albert de Rochas, and Darget.[36] The thought transfer Crookes had attributed to ether vibrations was a central model for Kandinsky, along with the ‘thought photography’ of Baraduc, working at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Kandinsky was deeply interested in Baraduc, who was but one of a number of figures, including the American engineer Edwin Houston, exploring the possibility of vibratory thought patterns being captured on a photographic plate. Houston, whose 1892 lecture on ‘Cerebral Radiation’ was reprinted as one of sixteen appendices in Rochas’s 1895 L’Extériorisation de la sensibilité, suggested that such an image could serve as a storage device, subsequently activating the same thought vibrations in another viewer—just as Kandinsky intended his paintings to do.[37]
Vibratory communication was also a theme of Duchamp’s nine-foot-tall work on glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) of 1915-23 (fig 7). Determined to ‘put painting once again at the service of the mind’, Duchamp investigated a wide range of scientific fields as well as four-dimensional geometry in order to invent the ‘Playful Physics’ of this work.[38] His extensive notes on the subject, which he considered as important as the visual image, stand as a time capsule of the popular scientific milieu of the pre-World War I era. In Duchamp’s humorous scientific allegory of sexual quest, the Bride hangs in her ethereal, four-dimensional realm at the top of the Glass and communicates with her desiring, three-dimensional, gravity-bound Bachelors below by means of her ‘splendid vibrations’.[39] The Bride’s basic form is rooted in X-ray images, and her vibratory communications are based on the model of wireless telegraphy and radio control. He also drew on a variety of other aspects of science and technology to create the insuperable contrasts between the upper and lower realms of the Glass: radioactivity, atomic theory, the kinetic theory of gases, Perrin’s work on Brownian movement, thermodynamics, the liquefaction of gases—as well as classical mechanics, chemistry, biology, meteorology, and automobile and airplane technology.
In the 1960s, long after both the fourth dimension of space and early wireless communication had faded from prominence (and before their return to cultural awareness in the later decades of the century), Duchamp contributed to the recovery of the largely forgotten spatial fourth dimension by publishing his extensive notes on the subject in his 1966 deluxe White Box [A l’infinitif].[40] It was a highly significant gesture by the artist who before World War I had unquestionably known more about contemporary science than any other. Yet the paradigm shift that occurred after 1919 left Duchamp detached from that cultural grounding. He would never engage Relativity Theory in a similar way, and his reference to the public ‘always need[ing] a banner, whether it be Picasso, Einstein, or some other’ was surely a reflection of the wrenching shift Einstein’s emergence created for an artist of thirty-two who was deeply grounded in an earlier scientific paradigm.
1920s-1940s: The Triumph of Einstein and Relativity Theory
While Duchamp’s study of science in the prewar period had predated Einstein, avant-garde artists in the 1920s, such as the Russian Naum Gabo and Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, responded directly to the new, temporal fourth dimension of Relativity Theory by incorporating time into their art.[41] Among these pioneering works were Gabo’s Kinetic Construction of 1920 and Moholy-Nagy’s Light Display Machine or Light-Space Modulator of 1922-30 (fig 8). The latter’s 1947 book Vision in Motion, published the year after his death, served as a highly influential codification of modernism in terms of the new space-time aesthetic and actually included Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 in this context. Indeed, Duchamp’s own experiments with rotating optical devices (eg the Rotary Demisphere of 1925) were incorporated into the lineage of kinetic art during the 1940s and regularly exhibited alongside works by Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Calder, and others during the 1950s and early 1960s.
If adding time to art was the dominant response to Einstein and space-time, several other approaches emerged in this period as well. One of the first reactions to Einstein’s new celebrity occurred in Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch’s collage Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany of 1919. There Höch, relying simply on Einstein’s visage, clipped his photograph from the front page of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and included him among her images of revolution in the upper left quadrant of the collage.[42] Beyond Einstein’s image itself, other artists responded to the deformations of distance and time posited by the Special Theory of Relativity.
Dali’s The Persistence of Memory of 1931 (fig 9), for example, embodies the parallel he saw between Einstein’s ‘physical dilation of measures’ and his own Surrealist ‘psychic dilation of ideas’.[43] Although Dali referred to his limp watches as ‘the soft, extravagant, and solitary paranoic-critical Camembert of time and space’, he generally drew on Special Relativity Theory rather than the curved space-time of General Relativity.[44] By contrast, younger Surrealist artists in the 1930s, such as Matta Echaurren, actually attempted to envision of the ‘look’ of the curved space-time continuum of General Relativity, as in his painting The Vertigo of Eros of 1944. André Breton wrote in 1939 that such works demonstrated the painters’ ‘deep yearning to transcend the three-dimensional universe […] as a result of Einstein’s introduction into physics of the space-time continuum’.[45]
However, it was the American painter Davis who made perhaps the most original artistic innovations in response to the new paradigm of Relativity Theory. Davis’s unique variation on Picasso and Braque’s Cubism grew out of Cubism’s second, collage-based phase, referred to as Synthetic Cubism, which commenced in 1912. (That style lies behind Picasso’s 1932 Girl Before a Mirror (fig 10), which reflects its later, more decorative qualities—along with the patterns of Henri Matisse—as well as the newer Surrealist focus on interior psychology and organic form.) Although Davis had spent a year in Paris in 1928-9, observing French painting at close range, it was only in the early 1930s that he began to develop his mature theories about how to paint landscapes in a modern style that both respected the two-dimensional surface of the canvas and could evoke landscape space. In contrast to the ‘window’ on invisible reality of prewar Analytical Cubism or Futurism, Davis’s planar works (see fig 14) essentially diagram the American landscape in a hard-edged, syncopated style that also owes something to the jazz piano rhythms he adored. However, it was Einstein and the literature on Relativity Theory that played a more fundamental role in the development of Davis’s mature theories and painting style.
Einstein had attracted Davis’s attention when the former visited the United States as a guest at Cal Tech during winter 1930-1 and 1931-2.[46] His visits triggered a barrage of journalistic coverage, inspiring the phrase in the verse of Herman Hupfeld’s ‘As Time Goes By’: ‘We get a trifle weary with Mr. Einstein’s theory’. Yet Davis was clearly not weary of Einstein’s theory in this period, and a clue to one of his specific sources occurs in a 1932 entry in his daybook (fig 11). One of Davis’s pages includes two diagrams, with the notations ‘when you draw this—you are drawing this rectan[gular] linear space, potentially’ and ‘you are drawing this angular direction, potentially, when you draw this’.[47] In his highly important popularization of Relativity Theory, The Mysterious Universe (1930), James Jeans had drawn just such a diagram to illustrate the fusion of space and time in the new space-time world of Einstein (fig 12). At this moment Jeans’s diagram offered Davis a new avenue for configuring nature via angles and triangles, which he termed ‘angular variation’.[48] As Davis recorded above his own drawing,
From any given point the line moves in a two-dimensional space relative to all existing points […] Relativity, knowledge of this fact, and the ability to visualize logical correlatives of a given angle allows the artist to see the real angular value of his drawing as opposed to associative value.[49]
When Davis used angular variation and triangles in paintings of 1932 such as Landscape with Garage Lights, his diagrammatic triangles also implied temporal associations through the model of Jeans’s space-time diagrams. Davis’s reliance on Jeans also helps to explain his statement that ‘a triangle could be analogous to a second of Time. The picture itself could be called a Duration of so many seconds of Time’.[50] Time would continue to be a central issue for Davis, although he would ultimately leave planar angular variation behind as a primary organizing element and pursue what he termed ‘color-space’.[51] While remaining committed to the two-dimensional surface of his paintings, Davis now followed Jeans up a dimension in order to create a logical space that would transcend the accidents of perception.[52] As Jeans had written following his space-time diagram, ‘We can imagine the three dimensions of space and one of time welded together, forming a four-dimensional volume, which we shall describe as a “continuum”’.[53] Indeed, Davis’s adoption of the hyphenated ‘color-space’ to describe his approach to space-making via colour suggests a deliberate response to the space-time continuum that was to become a conceptual touchstone for his painting.
When Davis painted Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors in 1940 (fig 13), he wrote of the new kind of ‘reality’ the work embodied:
The painting is abstract in the sense that it is highly selective, and it is synthetic in that it recombines these selections of color and shape into a new unity, which never existed in Nature but is a new part of Nature. An analogy would be a chemical like sulphanilamide which is a product of abstract selection and synthetic combination, and which never existed before, but is none the less real and a new part of nature.[54]
In Jeans’s discussions of the space-time continuum Davis would have found support for his position in contemporary debates about abstract painting. Jeans explained that while it could be said that ‘the four-dimensional continuum is […] purely diagrammatic, […] because we can exhibit all nature within this framework, it must correspond to some sort of objective reality’.[55] Similarly, Davis argued in his 1945 ‘Autobiography’ that ‘through science the whole concept of what reality is has been changed. Science has achieved the most astounding ‘abstract’ compositions, completely ‘unnatural’, but none-the-less real’.[56]
Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors (subtitled 7th Avenue Style) reflects Davis’s exuberant embrace of urban experience, including the ‘hot’ jazz rhythms that delighted him in and around his 7th Avenue studio. He had considered several possible titles for the painting, including Contra-Rural Landscape and Chemical Landscape, which make clear the work’s ‘abstract selection and synthetic combination’ of aspects of a city dweller’s experience—like the new sulfa ‘wonder drugs’. As listed by Davis, these included ‘Fruit and flowers; kitchen utensils; Fall skies, horizons, taxi cabs; radio; art exhibitions and reproductions; fast travel; Americana; movies; electric signs; dynamics of city sights and sounds; […]’.[57] Yet rather than depict such elements specifically Davis, as he subsequently explained, ‘introduced Time into Form by referring the immediate concrete shapes to more general shapes which have a much more extended existence in Time and Place’.[58]
Davis’s references here to ‘more general shapes’ as well as to ‘extended existence in Time and Place’—along with his mention in his 1940 text on Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors of ‘a new unity’ which ‘is a new part of Nature’—all point to the centrality of ideas about the space-time continuum for Davis and, specifically, its interpretation as a ‘block universe’. Minkowski had formulated the four-dimensional space-time continuum in 1908 in order to unify the multiple frames of reference of individual observers after Einstein had made them relative in 1905, and he actually referred to his structure as an ‘absolute’ world.[59] With events in an individual’s existence redefined by Minkowski as ‘world-lines’ traversing this four-dimensional continuum, subsequent theorizing led to the conception of a ‘block universe’. In this interpretation, summarized by Jeans in The Mysterious Universe, the space-time continuum is understood as a four-dimensional geometric structure in which future events are already extant (and past events preserved), and an individual simply progresses through three-dimensional cross sections of the structure as time progresses.[60]
Eager to create a rationalized vision of nature, Davis wrote in 1933 of his recent paintings:
This series of pictures […] presents simultaneously that which is observed sequentially. It rationalizes vision and creates a new view of nature which is not entirely the accident of binocular vision.
In contrast to ordinary methods which present on a canvas observations made in time and are therefore to a degree unrelated, this system brings into one focus and one place, the past, present, and future events involved in the act of observation of any given subject.[61]
Or, as he asserted in 1943 of his paintings’ similarity to the space-time continuum’s fusion of the relative viewpoints of all observers: ‘The result is an objective coherence not obtained before in painting. […] The total quality of the design evokes a cosmological point of view for the observer’.[62]
After the 1941 publication of Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, Davis was operating as the primary contemporary American Cubist in an artistic context in which connections between Picasso and Einstein or Cubism and Relativity were regularly being drawn. Yet it was Davis—not Picasso—whose art theory and style owed a debt to Einstein’s theories. Davis believed his art was an accurate response to the ‘spirit of modern society, which in its progressive aspects is materialistic and scientific’.[63] Einstein and the four-dimensional space-time continuum of Relativity Theory thus served as an effective vehicle for Davis to fashion himself as a logical, scientific painter in the art world of New York, in which the far more subjective style of Abstract Expressionism was emerging by the late 1940s.
Implications for the Question of Modernism in Art and Science
During 1950-2 Marcel Duchamp and Davis, two artists who found rich stimulation in science (albeit pre-Einsteinian for Duchamp and Einsteinian for Davis) were both consulting editors for the New York journal Trans/formation. The periodical affirmed on its masthead that ‘art, science, technology are interacting components of the total human enterprise’ and that, contrary to the contemporary tendency to treat them in isolation, Trans/formation would ‘cut across the arts and sciences by treating them as a continuum’.[64] That motto is a good reminder that in the early twentieth century scientific discoveries such as X-rays, radioactivity, and the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy generated a vast amount of popular literature that made them readily accessible to the general public. Popularizations of Relativity, including those by Jeans and Arthur Eddington, also brought aspects of Einstein’s theories into public purview, but the increasingly mathematical orientation of physics—and especially quantum physics—gradually dampened the early twentieth-century sense that the layperson should and could grasp the latest science. No longer would articles on the newest science routinely appear in general interest magazines like Harper’s Monthly, as they had done in the early years of the century. Only the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 would turn the public’s attention once again to atomic science in the later 1940s and 1950s, but other themes—fear of the atom or its potential for good—would dominate such discussions, rather than the science itself.[65]
Even if its subjects were phenomena invisible to the human eye, ether physics was still visualizable to some degree, and it clearly inspired artists to attempt to paint windows onto a ‘meta-reality’ just beyond perception’s reach. As in Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler or Boccioni’s Matter, it was an ethereal, spatially ambiguous, vibrating, and fluctuant realm of interpenetrating matter and space that was envisioned—supported by the model of continuity offered by the ether, Le Bon’s focus on dematerializing matter, and Bergson’s philosophy. Here the ‘fourth dimension’ was another sign of that higher reality: a suprasensible dimension of space, often linked to the ether, rather than a component of Einsteinian space-time. And in that earlier context painters regularly sought to give form to invisible energies and dimensions.
How different, then, are the flat, diagrammatic images of Davis with their hard-edged clarity and logic; they are not meant to be looked through, but stand instead as self-sufficient inscriptions, composed of discrete, discontinuous components. As noted earlier, Davis’s planar units derive stylistically from the prewar Synthetic Cubist collages and paintings of Picasso and Braque, which subsequently became standard fare in modern painting. However, those planes had nothing inherently to do with Einstein until Davis determined to use them as elements in a painting style that he believed could approximate the objectivity he identified with the space-time continuum as a ‘block universe’, free of the accidents of individual perception. With its forms transcending the specifics of observation at any given moment, works such as Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors accomplished Davis’s goal for painting, which he ultimately designated as ‘The Amazing Continuity’ (as he painted the phrase on his 1952 painting Visa).[66] Rather than the ethereal continuity of Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, however, continuity for Davis signified a new matrix of experience—the space-time continuum.[67]
Just as there is no single entity ‘modern art’, but rather the products of multiple artists on two sides of a major divide between 1900-19 and the 1920s-40s, the ‘science’ to which the artists responded in the two periods differed significantly. In the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century, discoveries made in the context of the still-reigning ether physics excited the imaginations of cutting-edge artists of the era, but predated public knowledge of the science later considered to be ‘modern’, ie Relativity Theory. There was no zeitgeist that meant that Picasso must have responded to Einstein. Instead, for artists, the concept of ‘science’ in any given year after 1905 signified a variety of exhilarating new ideas other than Relativity Theory—at least through World War I. Popular scientific writing, including by scientists like Lodge and popularizers like Le Bon, abounded in this period and served as the interface between the realms of art and science. We miss far too much of the richness of modernism when the simplistic tendency to link the two ‘banners’—Picasso and Einstein—impedes the historical recovery of that highly creative and complex moment in the early twentieth century.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson
Linda Dalrymple Henderson is the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History, Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching have focused on modern art in its broader cultural context, including ideas such as ‘the fourth dimension’, the history of science and technology, and mystical and occult philosophies. In addition to over eighty journal articles and essays in book and catalogues, she is the author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton 1983; new ed Cambridge MA 2013) and Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton 1998).
[1] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (Thames and Hudson 1971) 26. This essay is an updated version of a text of this title published in the catalogue for the 2012 exhibition The Moderns at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, curated by Cathrin Pichler and Suzanne Neuberger. The discussion of Stuart Davis herein draws directly on the ‘Reintroduction’ I was then adding to the 2013 edition of my book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (originally 1983). I am currently at work on a project titled ‘Ether and the Energies of Modernism: Art, Science, and Occultism in the Early Twentieth Century’. This new book recovers a crucial backdrop for the develop of modern art by tracking science as known to the public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the prominent role of the ether of space both in its scientific and occult contexts.
[2] Alfred H Barr Jr, What is Modern Painting? (The Museum of Modern Art 1943) 29.
[3] For this phenomenon, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Four-Dimensional Space or Space-Time? The Emergence of the Cubism-Relativity Myth in New York in the 1940s’ in Michele Emmer (ed), The Visual Mind II (MIT Press 2004) 349-97, as well as typical texts such as Paul M Laporte, ‘The Space-Time Concept in the Work of Picasso’ (1948) 41 The Magazine of Art 26-32; Paul M Laporte, ‘Cubism and Science’ (1949) 7 The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism 243-56.
[4] For the principles and popularization of Relativity Theory, see eg Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Atomic Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press 1999) 90-104. On the absence of significant interest in Special Relativity in France, where Henri Poincaré was the dominant figure of science, see Stanley Goldberg, Understanding Relativity: Origin and Impact of a Scientific Revolution (Birkhäuser 1984) ch 7; Thomas Glick (ed), The Comparative Reception of Relativity (D. Reidel Publishing Co 1987) 113-67. For a sampling of early responses to Einstein, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton University Press 1998) 234 n 19.
[5] For these developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physics, see eg Kragh (n 4); PM Harman, Energy, Force, Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics (Cambridge University Press 1982); Alex Keller, The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in His Cradle (Clarendon Press 1983). I discuss the popularization of the work of the scientists listed here in Henderson (n 4) and in the book in progress. The public appeal of scientists like Crookes and Lodge was augmented by their openness to aspects of the occult; see the pioneering study by Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press 2019).
[6] Oliver Lodge, ‘Electric Theory of Matter’ (Harper’s Monthly Magazine, August 1904) 383-9. On the ether, see eg Bruce J Hunt, ‘Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether’ in Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (eds), From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford University Press 2002) 99-113; MJS Hodge and GN Cantor, Conceptions of Ether: A Study in the History of Ether Theories 1740-1900 (Cambridge University Press 1981); Harman (n 5). For a more recent discussion, see Jaume Navarro (ed), Ether and Modernity: The Recalcitrance of an Epistemic Object in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press 2018), with its documentation of the ‘recalcitrance’ of the ether. Donald R Benson, ‘Facts and Fictions in Scientific Discourse: The Case of the Ether’ (1984) 38 The Georgia Review 825-37 remains a useful introduction to the ether in the cultural context of nineteenth-century science.
[7] Oliver Lodge, The Ether of Space (Harper & Brothers 1909) 104-5.
[8] William Crookes, ‘Address by Sir William Crookes, President’ in Report of the Sixty-Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1898) (John Murray 1899) 31.
[9] For this history, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press 1983) ch 1. For a more extensive discussion, see Mark Blacklock, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford University Press 2018).
[10] Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe, or Speculations on a Future State (4th edn, Macmillan 1876) 221.
[11] Charles Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension (Swan Sonnenschein & Co 1904) 17-8. On the impact of the ideas on the fourth dimension and the ether propounded by Hinton as well as Stewart and Tait and their larger context, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (MIT Press 2013) 2-7, 15-21; Henderson (n 9) ch 1.
[12] On Relativity Theory, see Kragh (n 4) 90-104.
[13] Henderson (n 11) 69-91.
[14] Ramón Gómez de la Serna, ‘Completa y veridical historia de Picasso y el cubisme’ (1929) 25 Revista de Occidente 100.
[15] Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations (Wittenborn and Co 1944) 12.
[16] Duchamp cites Jouffret in his notes for his Large Glass project, documenting the book’s presence in the Parisian avant-garde; see Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Oxford University Press 1973) 89. On Princet’s much-debated role, which itself forms an interesting history, see eg Henderson (n 9) ch 2. Artist Tony Robbin has reconstructed the history of early attempts to model four-dimensional geometry and suggests further convincing comparisons between specific elements in Picasso’s Cubist works and Jouffret’s innovative technique in Tony Robbin, Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought (Yale University Press 2006) 29-33.
[17] Henri Poincaré, La Science et l’hypothèse (Flammarion 1902) 89-90.
[18] ibid 72-73. See Henderson (n 9) ch 2. For Cubist theory in its larger context, see also Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighton, Cubism and Culture (Thames & Hudson).
[19] The discussion of X-rays and radioactivity that follows is presented in greater detail in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists’ (1988) 47 Art Journal 323-40; Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science—An Overview; II. Cubism, Futurism, and Ether Physics in the Early 20th Century’ (2004) 17 Science in Context 447-50.
[20] See eg Gustave Le Bon, ‘The Decay of Matter’ (The Independent, 26 July 1906) 183-6.
[21] On Bergson and Cubism, see again Antliff and Leighten (n 18).
[22] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Zone Books 1988) 200-1.
[23] ibid 196, 208.
[24] Gilbert Boudar and Michel Décaudin, Catalogue de la bibliothèque de Guillaume Apollinaire (Editions du CNRS 1983) 52. See Commandant Darget, Exposé des différentes méthodes pour l'obtention de photographies fluido-magnétiques et spirites: Rayons V (vitaux) (Ed. de l'Inititation 1909).
[25] For a fuller version of this case for the relevance of the ether for Picasso and prewar Parisian culture—and its documentation, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science—An Overview; II. Cubism, Futurism, and Ether Physics in the Early 20th Century’ (2004) 17 Science in Context 448-53. For Picasso’s photography, see Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror (Flammarion 1997) eg figs. 83, 84, 109.
[26] On this topic, see eg Navarro (n 6). Indexes such as the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature document the continued public interest in the ether after 1919.
[27] JJ Thomson, ‘Address by the President, Sir J. J. Thomson’ in Report of the Seventy-Ninth Meeting of the British Associaton for the Advancement of Science (1909) (John Murray 1910) 15.
[28] Esther Coen, Umberto Boccioni (The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1988). On Boccioni, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space’ in Clarke and Henderson (n 6) and, for a fuller discussion, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Umberto Boccioni’s Elasticity, Italian Futurism, and the Ether of Space’ in Navarro (n 6).
[29] Umberto Boccioni, Dynamisme plastique: peinture et sculpture futuriste (L'Age d'Homme 1975) 105.
[30] ibid.
[31] Robert Kennedy Duncan, The New Knowledge (A. S. Barnes 1905) 5.
[32] Coen (n 28) 239.
[33] Umberto Boccioni et al, Futurist Manifestos (Viking Press 1973) 89.
[34] Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space’ in Clarke and Henderson (n 6).
[35] Wassily Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ in Complete Writings on Art (Da Capo 1994) 142, 197. For a fuller discussion of Kandinsky, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Abstraction, the Ether, and the Fourth Dimension: Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich in Context’ (Interalia, November 2020) <https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/linda-dalrymple-henderson-abstraction-the-ether-and-the-fourth-dimension-kandinsky-mondrian-and-malevich-in-context/> accessed 16 August 2025.
[36] Kandinsky cites both Flammarion and Crookes in a footnote in On the Spiritual in Art, see Kandinsky (n 35) 143. On Kandinsky's interest in Flammarion, Baraduc, and Rochas, as well as Crookes, whose writings were regularly translated in France, see eg Sixton Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting (Abo Akademi 1970) 51-5, 122-3. A copy of Darget's book—owned also by Apollinaire, see (n 24)—is in the Nina Kandinsky archive in the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. While Kandinsky knew the 1901 book Thought-Forms by Theosophists Annie Besant and CW Leadbeater (who cite Baraduc), his belief in the coming ‘epoch of the Great Spiritual’ and the role his art could play in that process drew significantly on the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, as documented in Long 1980. For Kandinsky’s paintings of this period, see the excellent Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalogue: Magdalena Dabrowksi (ed), Kandinsky: Compositions (The Museum of Modern Art 1995).
[37] For a further discussion of Baraduc, Rochas, and Houston, see Henderson (n 34) 140-2; Henderson (n 35).
[38] Duchamp (n 16) 49, 125. See Henderson (n 4), on which this paragraph is based. For a concise overview of the science Duchamp engaged, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘The Large Glass Seen Anew: Reflections of Science and Technology in Marcel Duchamp’s “Hilarious Picture”’ (1999) 32(2) Leonardo 113-26.
[39] Duchamp (n 16) 42.
[40] See ibid 74-101.
[41] For the artists’ responses to Einstein here and in the following two paragraphs, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Einstein and 20th-Century Art: A Romance of Many Dimensions’ in Peter Galison, Gerald Holton, and Silvan S Schweber (eds), Einstein for the 21st Century (Princeton University Press 2008) 101-29. On Moholy-Nagy and Duchamp in this context, see Henderson (n 11) 35-42.
[42] See Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hôch (Yale University Press 1993).
[43] Salvador Dali, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dali (Haim Finkelstein ed, Cambridge University Press 1998) 229.
[44] ibid 272.
[45] André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Brentano’s 1945) 152. For an excellent study of Surrealism and science, including both Einstein and quantum physics, see Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art, and Modern Physics (Yale University Press 2007).
[46] Ronald W Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (World Publishing 1971) 426-35, 444-5.
[47] Diane Kelder (ed), Stuart Davis (Praeger 1971) 55.
[48] ibid.
[49] ibid.
[50] ibid 58.
[51] See eg John R Lane, Stuart Davis: Art and Theory (The Brooklyn Museum 1978) 66.
[52] See ibid 28.
[53] James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (The Macmillan Co 1931) 109.
[54] Stuart Davis, ‘Stuart Davis’ (1940) 12 Parnassus 6.
[55] Jeans (n 53) 109.
[56] Kelder (n 47) 30.
[57] Davis (n 54) 6.
[58] Lane (n 51) 17-8.
[59] Eddington echoes that language in his talk of the space-time continuum as an ‘absolute world-structure’; see Arthur S Eddington, The Nature of the Physical Universe (The Macmillan Co 1929) 62.
[60] Jeans (n 53) 127-8.
[61] Lane (n 51) 28.
[62] Lane (n 51) 57.
[63] ibid 66.
[64] 1 Trans/formation: Arts, Communication, Environment, A World Review (1950) inside front cover.
[65] On this subject, see eg Paul Boyer, By Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (The University of North Carolina Press 1994).
[66] For further discussion of the ‘Amazing Continuity’, which to date has always been interpreted in purely art historical terms (following a 1952 comment to Alfred Barr by Davis), see Henderson (n 11) 27-34.
[67] While a shift away from the fluidity suggestive of the ether characterizes modern painting after Cubism, Futurism, and Kandinsky of the 1910s, artists like Duchamp and Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich engaged the ether but adopted hard-edge, diagrammatic styles. On the ether-related aspects of the Large Glass, see Henderson (n 4) ch 8. As I have argued elsewhere, Malevich's interest in ‘cuts’ through a plane or space of a lower dimension followed Charles Howard Hinton's association of such planes / spaces with a fluid film analogous to the ether, an argument reiterated by PD Ouspensky in his Tertium Organum (1911), a book well known to the Russian avant-garde. On this subject, see Henderson (n 35); for a basic discussion of Malevich (sans ether), see Henderson (n 9) ch 5.