Linda Dalrymple Henderson

Profile

Join date: Mar 1, 2026

About

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 University Press 1983; new ed MIT Press 2013) and Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton University Press 1998).

Articles (1)

Mar 3, 2026 ∙ 32 min

Modern Art and Science 1900-40: From the Ether and a Spatial Fourth Dimension (1900-20) to Einstein and Space-Time (1920s-40s)

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...