Inside Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein
Welcome to the blog for Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
During the Mead’s presentation of Dimensionism, this site will feature weekly postings that examine different facets of the exhibition. Topics will include the design of the show, the public programs, and the art-science dialogue that informed the publication that gives the exhibition its name: the 1936 Dimensionist Manifesto. Arguing that art should respond to the scientific advancements of the day, this little-known manifesto was endorsed by some of the best-known artists of the twentieth century, including Marcel Duchamp, Sonia Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Calder, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
In one way or another, I’ve been thinking about Dimensionism for about a decade now. It started with my doctoral research and began to formulate itself as an exhibition after I came to the Mead. It was here that I wonder about how the story of Dimensionism could look as an exhibition and how this story could transform the way we tell the history of modern art, and more generally the relationship between art and science. With its liberal arts mission, Amherst College was an ideal stage for this project. Creating dialogue between the arts and sciences on campus draw into focus questions about how art and science can learn from each other, and more fundamentally, what we gain by thinking more fluidly across disciplines, beyond our own areas of specialty.
The excitement around this new narrative of modern art and the encouragement of the Mead’s director, David E. Little, resulted in a national tour of Dimensionism! The show’s first venue was at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and we are thrilled it has now come to its home institution at the Mead, after which it will travel to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.
I hope that this blog will allow you to learn more about the story of Dimensionism and encourage you to come see the exhibition and participate in related programming at the Mead. Most of all, I hope the ripple effects of Dimensionism introduce new artists to the canon, and offer new ways of thinking about the artists we thought we already knew.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
The 1936 Dimensionist Manifesto declared that artists should strive to respond to the scientific revolutions going on all around them in fields from astrophysics to microbiology. Under the leadership of the Hungarian poet Charles Sirató, a group of artists conceived of and endorsed the Manifesto. In a moment when mass-media publications were introducing the wider public to Albert Einstein’s theories of relative time and early conceptions of our dynamic and expanding universe, the Manifesto argued that art, too, must expand itself. Two-dimensional painters sought to add a third dimension. Three-dimensional sculptors sought to add motion as the fourth dimension, the better to explore Einstein’s theory of relativity, in which space and time are no longer separate categories. “All the old limits and boundaries of the arts disappear,” wrote the authors of the Manifesto, because “This new ideology has elicited a veritable earthquake and subsequent landslide in the conventional artistic system.”
The Manifesto was born in Paris, developed through the collaboration of an international body of American and European artists. As geopolitical earthquakes shook Europe in the approach to the Second World War, the United States offered a home and testing ground for many Dimensionist artists. These included the U.S.-born Calder, who relocated from Paris to Roxbury, Connecticut, and helped several of his international colleagues do the same. The circle of Dimensionists expanded well beyond the original signatories of the Manifesto to include a group of artists who, in the words of the Manifesto, vowed to shun “dead forms and exhausted essences as prey for less demanding artists.”
As manifestos go, the Dimensionist Manifesto allowed ample room for interpretation. Many of its artists engaged with and understood the new science in very different ways, ranging from purely scientific to the spiritual. The Manifesto’s verso included a mosaic of individual signing statements, which demonsted this diversity of viewpoints. The full document serves both as an interpretive aid and a significant “common ancestor” for a network of international artists. It is a remarkable window into a historical moment of encounter among artists, illuminating their highly self-conscious responses—through their artworks—to rapidly changing conceptions of the material world and of humans’ agency within it.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Image Caption: The Dimensionist Manifesto, 1936. To see the Manifesto it its original French please click here. To see the full English translation click here.
Director’s Welcome: Notes on Making Dimensionism
David E. Little, Director and Chief Curator, Mead Art Museum
Great shows often hide the thought and labor that make them successful. I have been thinking about the work of the Mead’s talented staff, particularly Curator of American Art Vanja Malloy, in anticipation of Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein,opening at the Mead March 28. This exhibition has been three years in the making. Vanja has led the project, with a tremendous team at the Mead and Amherst College working on various aspects of the show—exhibition catalog, editing, shipping, design, installation, marketing, fundraising, and education and I am sure I have left something out!
Vanja and I first talked about her exhibition ideas only months after I started at the Mead in fall 2015. This was even before I learned about traffic on Route 9 and the scholarly dedication of Amherst undergraduates. The conversation began with her dissertation on Calder, then quickly morphed into a discussion about a little-known manifesto. Calder was an amazing artist, to be sure, but it was clear that this manifesto calling for an artistic response to new scientific notions of time and space was historically transformative. Dimensionism shows how the manifesto changed the way we think about modern art—and illuminates the role of women artists who have often been overlooked in twentieth-century art narratives.
Exhibitions are glamorous and exciting, with beautiful objects purposefully lit and arranged in a way that tells a specific story. Getting there takes hard work, will power, negotiation, patience, flexibility, support, resilience, and a leap of faith. Putting together a show is as much alchemical as it is paying attention to details. It all begins, of course, with a great concept and art. But it is also about crafting the perfect grant letter; making complex ideas accessible in wall labels; persuading a museum curator or collector to loan their most prized possessions; sequencing objects; and designing an environment that makes visitors feel. Ultimately, there’s more to it than a blog post can convey. Come visit Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein and just enjoy!
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
The publication accompanying Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein offers a deep dive into the ideas of the 1936 Dimensionist Manifesto and the ways in which modern artists responded to the scientific revolutions of their time. In addition to my own writing on the subject, the exhibition catalogue includes art historical essays by leading scholars in the specialized field of modern art and science, including Oliver A. I. Botar from the University of Manitoba, Linda Dalrymple Henderson from the University of Texas at Austin, and Gavin Parkinson from the Courtauld Institute of Art. The MIT Press published the catalogue in 2018.
These essays provide in-depth explorations of the Manifesto, the multivalent meaning of the fourth dimension in 1936, and the popularization of sciences such as relativity and quantum theory in the early twentieth century. In addition to the English-language version of the Dimensionist Manifesto, the catalogue includes a history of the Dimensionist Manifesto that Charles Sirató wrote in 1966, thirty years after the Manifesto was authored. This document provides a unique voice to this artistic movement, documenting the friendships and shared interests between many of the most influential artists of the early twentieth century. It provides an invaluable narrative on the formation of the Dimensionist Manifesto, with detailed accounts of how artists learned of the Manifesto and engaged with its ideals. It further offers details on the larger circle of artists that participated in the formation of the manifesto but for various reasons did not end up signing it. Published for the first time in English, I hope this significant and extensive document will be a vital resource for future research on this topic.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Image Caption: Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein (The MIT Press, 2018).
Brain Hiccups and New Dimensions
Jocelyn Edens, Interim Assistant Museum Educator, Mead Art Museum
Every once in a while, when I think of the grounding concepts in Dimensionism, my brain hiccups in surprise. Sure, these ideas have been around for a century, but I still need to pause to imagine that objects at a great, planetary scale are right now stretching and warping as they move through spacetime, or that at a teeny tiny subatomic scale it’s possible to be at two places at the same time. Reality is wild and weird, and Dimensionism reminds me not to trust my mere human-scaled intuitive notions about how the universe behaves and what it looks like.
Combine these science concepts with the dynamic, lush, curious artworks in the show, and Dimensionism is an educator’s playground. We have lots of programs and group visits in the works, but one program in particular is on my mind. The Community Day program we’re planning for May 4 (may the fourth be with you) riffs off the Dimensionist Manifesto formula “N+1,” what Charles Sirató called the “one single common law” of the art of his time. “N+1” describes a mode of making that pushes the boundaries of form: text takes a shape, painting breaks into three-dimensional space, sculpture is dynamic and kinetic, and matter dematerializes into immersive “matter-music.” From 1–3 p.m. on Saturday May 4, visitors can explore making stations guided by student museum educators, and to experiment with ways that chance and visual composition helps us write surprising poems, play with materials in balance and tension to make sculpture-mobiles (we’ll be prototyping this one at the Amherst Regional Public Schools Science Night). We’re also in conversation with Jake Meginsky, a composer, filmmaker, and lecturer at Amherst College, about making new sound art that responds to work in the exhibition and positions listeners inside what Sirató might have called “cosmic space.”
During a recent brainstorming conversation, Jake introduced Chladni plates as something we might think about during Community Day. Talk about a brain hiccup: a Chladni plate visualizes the frequency of a sound into geometric patterns with nothing more than sand or salt and a sound input. Ernst Chladni experimented with these in the eighteenth century to conclude that sound travels in waves. Stop by Community Day on May 4 and you may get to experiment with one of these wild and weird things.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Image caption: Charles Sirató, Paris, 1936.
Organizing the Exhibition: The Themes that Makeup Dimensionism
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
By the time the Dimensionist Manifesto was created in 1936, discussions of Einstein’s theory of relativity had appeared in poetry, magazines, journals, pulp fiction, and comics, as well as the visual arts. By the 1920s, the revolutionary astronomical implications of relativity had created an unprecedented interest in theoretical physics, which posited that space was warped by the gravitational pulls of cosmic bodies and introduced the theory of the expanding universe. By the early twentieth century, increasingly powerful telescopes were providing a plethora of new information, which led to the discovery of multiple galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Telescopic photographs continued to play a role in publicizing and popularizing radically new perceptions of the universe. Journals such as Scientific American published the photographs and used non-technical language to explain the theory of relativity and its impact on astronomy. The resulting accessibility of such complex topics also launched some unsettling philosophical debates. For instance, renewed discussions of determinism born out of the theory of relativity questioned the reality of free will, and the idea of an infinitely expanding universe altered humankind’s assumptions about their own importance. The same developments that made possible newly powerful telescopes also made possible the invention of newly powerful microscopes, allowing both scientists and nonscientists to connect the life cycle of the tiniest organisms to that of stars and planets that make up the sprawl of the universe.
By imagining worlds beyond what is visible to the naked eye, the macro- and micro-world extremes provided artists with the opportunity to imagine what those realms would look like. Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein draws on these various areas of inspiration in its organization, starting with the the 1936 Dimensionist Manifesto, and then branching off to explore the influence of the new scientific advances that inspired an age of wonderment in the early twentieth century. That is, the concept of the Theory of Relativity, the micro and macro realms, and the new physics of Quantum Theory.
Visitors entering the exhibition are greeted with an introduction to the Dimensionist Manifesto. The Manifesto is presented in its original French, alongside contemporary English translations offered in enlarged formats for easy reading as well as take-away leaflets printed on double-sided paper and folded in a manner reminiscent of the original. This first section introduces artists who signed the Manifesto and offers examples of many of their works. The idea was to draw out the wide breadth of interpretation in these artists’ works, showing how science united them but also manifested in vastly different ways in their art, reflecting different points of interest, comfort and background in the sciences.
The next theme is “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity,” which shows how the artists working in the early twentieth century responded to the changing understanding of the fourth dimension. Artists who had been born in the 1880s or earlier tended to retain their pre-Manifesto ideas of ether and spatial fourth-dimensions in their work, even into the 1930s, while younger artists tended to integrate into their works the new non-Euclidean geometries and concerns with space-time that emerged from Einstein’s relativity.
Then comes “Microcosm and Macrocosm,” which includes works that show astronomy becoming more prominent in the visual vocabulary of artists working in this time period. Many of these works were clearly inspired by the new telescope lenses and their photographic evidence of exponentially more stars and cosmic bodies than were previously believed to exist. Not only was the cosmos expanding, so was our visual conception of it. Cosmic bodies weren't still and unchanging after all: they have life cycles and are moving at extremely rapid rates in all possible directions. In other words, the universe was immeasurably large and dynamic, a giant conceptual shift that enlivened the works of artists who grappled with it. Meanwhile, some artists were blurring the distinction between abstraction and representation, inspired by new technologies that made microscopic and cellular organisms and particles visible in photographs and film. For instance, x-ray crystallography influenced Naum Gabo, whose wire creations evoke the beautiful, mathematical structures seen at the end of a microscope.
The show concludes with the a section on uncertainty and quantum theory, which operates at the smallest level. If Einstein's relativity promoted the idea of universal order through a law explaining the gravitational pull of planets and stars, quantum law is in many ways a direct opposite. It introduced the notion of chance into the vocabulary of science, prompting philosophical debates about causality and determinism and their implications for humanity.
Hopefully visitors walk away from Dimensionism with a new appreciation of how science shaped the early twentieth century. While Einstein’s famous theory of relativity gets most of the credit, it wasn’t the only important scientific development. Advances in biology, astronomy, chemistry, and physics showed us that in many cases our senses are deceptive, and that to more accurately represent reality we have to image it through the science of our times. While the means of creating art in this era was in many ways restricted to more traditional materials like paint or sculpture, albeit with some attempts to incorporate motors and light projections, its interesting to consider how artists continue to grapple with these ideas today through the new technologies offered by our time period such as virtual reality.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Math in Dimensionism: The Spatial Fourth Dimension
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
By the early 1920s, the term “fourth dimension” was often used in reference to the space-time continuum derived from Einstein’s theory of relativity. However, well before Einstein and relativity, the term “fourth dimension” had been used to refer to a higher spatial dimension that was born out of mathematics. This idea was popularized in part by Edwin Abbott Abbott’s book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which was first published in 1884 and reached a broad audience that included some Dimensionist artists such as Marcel Duchamp. To better understand the ways this new mathematics challenged artists to reenvision space, watch the film adapted from the Abbott’s Flatland, linked here.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Physics in Dimensionism: The Solar Eclipse in 4-D Spacetime
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
After looking at the meaning of the term “fourth dimension” before Einstein in last week’s post, this time we’ll examine the significance of Einstein’s “fourth dimension” and the theory of relativity more broadly. The Dimensionist Manifesto called for art to respond to the new science of its time and the resulting technical advances, and called specific attention to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the new fourth dimension of space-time, and the importance of non-Euclidean geometry. Einstein’s special theory of relativity in 1905 introduced the fourth dimension of space-time in which space and time are inseperately joined together, and also showed that time can be dilated and is not the constant that we experience in our daily lives. His 1916 theory of general relativity built upon special relativity to add gravitational forces. Previously, space was thought of as Euclidean: a triangle adds up to 180 degrees, for example, or parallel lines must stay parallel. General relativity showed that objects can stretch and warp as they move through cosmic space, where parallel lines need not stay parallel.
Our confirmation of a curved non-Euclidean space actually can be credited to the observation of a celestial phenomenon: the total solar eclipse. The solar eclipse brought Einstein’s theory of relativity into the mainstream because it allowed scientists to observe a key postulate of general relativity in action. This happened when a team of British astronomers led by Cambridge astrophysicist Arthur Eddington traveled to parts of South American and Africa to observe the eclipse visible on May 29, 1919. By measuring the effects of the sun’s gravitational field on the light of a nearby group of stars, these scientists confirmed that the starlight traveled a curved path around the sun, and therefore that cosmic space was curved and non-Euclidean. The results were announced later that same year at the joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society of London, provoking an international media frenzy that made Einstein a household name. For months afterward, newspapers featured daily articles on relativity that attempted to explain the theories through scientific, social, and even political modes of discussion. In 1925, artists living in parts of the United States, including New York City, had an opportunity to observe a solar eclipse and witness Einstein’s relativity in action. Many articles published in local newspapers and popular journals encouraged the public to go observe the eclipse and to think of it through the discovery of this new science. Popular discussion of relativity became commonplace, and influential: The artist Isamu Noguchi’s discussions of the mass-energy equivalence formula E=MC2 with his friend Buckminster Fuller inspired the creation of two works in this exhibition. To better understand and visualize relativity, take a look at this fun video.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Filming Relativity
Hannah Goodwin, assistant professor of Film and Media Studies, Mount Holyoke College
When Sir Arthur Eddington announced, in 1919, that the photographs resulting from his recent expedition to view a solar eclipse gave visual evidence of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a sense of excitement about the capacity of photographic media to capture and visualize this perplexing theory rapidly spread. Countless amateurs sent their eclipse photographs to the astronomers at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, hoping that they too might have scientific value, and other well-intentioned members of the public wrote letters recommending that the astronomers use moving-image film in subsequent efforts to document celestial phenomena. This public interest in filming relativity was complemented by an enthusiasm for two films that emerged within a few years of Eddington’s expedition: Die Grundlagen der Einsteinischen Relitivitätstheorie (The Principles of the Einsteinian Theory of Relativity, a German film directed by Hanns Walter Kornblum in 1922; and its U.S. counterpart, The Einstein Theory of Relativity (Out of the Inkwell Productions, animated by Max Fleischer). While some complained that the films were dull and others opined on their scientific inaccuracies, both films were screened widely in theaters and attracted large audiences when they were released. Indeed, when the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York hosted a public screening of the U.S. version in 1929, 4,500 people showed up to see the film, causing a riot as they stormed the gates of the Museum of Natural History.
Einstein himself disavowed these films, and it’s not hard to see why. The U.S. version (which, unlike its German forebear, has been preserved) occasionally misrepresents and at times contradicts Einstein’s actual theories. One sequence, for example, tells us that Einstein’s theory undermines the idea that time is linear, and the film subsequently shows a projectile overcoming the speed of light and racing through space to view Earth’s history. Considering that Einstein’s theory specifically states that the speed of light is a constant that can’t be overcome, this bears more resemblance to science fiction than science. As a film scholar, though, I still find this film fascinating. To me it demonstrates a thrilling impulse to use the still relatively new medium of film to stage a mobility through time and space that was widely associated with Einstein’s theories as they circulated popularly. Like many of the artworks in Dimensionism, these films betray a sense of the instability of the dimensions, and they test the aesthetic and technological possibilities of representation to capture concepts that eluded the ordinary senses. In their misinterpretations of Einstein, they reveal a culture filled with simultaneous apprehension and excitement about what the newly uncertain universe held in store.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Reflections on The Fourth Dimension by Patrick J. Sullivan
Camilo Ortiz, Amherst College Class of 2020, Physics, Art History, and Computer Science triple major
The Fourth Dimension immediately reminded me of the twin paradox. The scenario goes like this: suppose that there is a set of identical twins on Earth named Fred and George. One day, George, out of disillusionment with the current state of geopolitics, decides to take a very fast spaceship that travels at .8c (where c is the speed of light) and departs into the unknown. Then suppose that George decides he’s made a mistake. Missing his brother dearly, he stops at a star four light-years away (a light-year, abbreviated as ly, is the distance light travels in one year) and turns around, flying back toward Earth at .8c. The question is, how will the ages of the brothers differ once George is reunited with Fred?
Thanks to special relativity, we know that at high speeds funky things happen with the progression of time. To understand time dilation, we have to use something called the Lorentz factor, an equation that describes how time, length, and mass change for an object moving at speeds close to the speed of light. Essentially, when an object travels at high speeds, time moves slower for it relative to a “stationary” observer.
But, before we get into any sort of dilation effects, let’s see how long the trip will seem to Fred, who stayed home. Because George is moving at .8c and he is traveling eight light-years in total, it will take him ten years to complete the trip from Fred’s perspective (t=distance/speed).
Now, for George, this time period will seem different. While Fred is awaiting his brother’s return in a non-accelerating reference frame, George’s frame of reference is moving at a rate close to the speed of light. Therefore, according to the Lorentz factor, it takes George only six years to travel to the star and back, and he comes home four years younger than Fred. The paradox arises because George can’t figure out why Fred aged ten years.
In George’s frame, it’s Fred and the earth that are moving away from him at .8c. So, using the same time-dilation effects from before, George thinks that his trip of six years in his frame would result in 3.6 years in Fred’s frame. So, when he gets back and sees that his dear brother Fred aged 10 years and not 3.6 he is very confused!
The issue is that the theory of special relativity can only predict the time dilation of an accelerated frame given an unaccelerated frame. So, Fred was able to predict George’s clock because Fred’s frame did not accelerate and was inertial. But during George’s trip, he stopped the ship at the star and turned around. That action made George’s frame become non-inertial, and therefore George’s calculations were incorrect because his non-inertial frame moved him out of the realm of special relativity. Therefore, Fred was correct, and George returned to Earth four years younger than him.
The character on the left in The Fourth Dimension reminds me of Fred, trapped on earth and waiting. On the right, it seems to me that George returned too late and that something terrible happened to Fred during his absence, reading the axis in the center of the canvas as a separation between scenes of the paradox. Though my reading of The Fourth Dimension isn’t the happiest one, I still find its correlations with modern physics very interesting. Well done, Patrick J. Sullivan!
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Astronomy in Dimensionism: The New Dynamism
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
By the early twentieth century, increasingly powerful telescopes were providing a plethora of new information, which led to the discovery of multiple galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Telescopic photographs helped publicize and popularize radically new perceptions of the universe. Journals such as Scientific American published the photographs and used non-technical language to explain the theory of relativity and its impact on astronomy. The resulting accessibility of such complex topics also launched some unsettling philosophical debates. New theories of determinism threatened to eliminate the possibility of free will, and the idea of an infinitely expanding universe altered humans’ assumptions about their own importance. Consequently, astronomy became more prominent in the visual vocabulary of artists working in this time period. Many of these works were clearly inspired by photographic evidence of exponentially more stars and cosmic bodies than were previously believed to exist. The realm of the cosmos was expanding, not only in reality but in our visual conception of it. Cosmic bodies—formerly imagined as eternally still and unchanging— turned out to have life cycles like any other living being and to be moving at extremely rapid rates in all possible directions. In other words, the universe was suddenly understood as immeasurably large and dynamic, and this giant shift in concept enlivened the works of artists who grappled with it.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Image caption: Detail of “Spiral nebula on edge,” published in the July 16, 1921 issue of Scientific American.
Jean Painlevé and the Microscope
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
The Dimensionist Manifesto called for art to evolve in response to the new science of its time and the resulting technical advances, including Einstein’s theory of relativity, the new fourth dimension of space-time, and the importance of non-Euclidean geometry. One of the great technological advances of this era was lens design, from microscopes to telescopes, in which the United States was a world leader. More powerful lenses allowed closer inspection of the micro realm, and artists took advantage with photographs and films of newly visible microscopic domains. The filmmaker Jean Painlevé, for instance, used new technologies to create documentaries that offered viewers an immersive experience of microbial environments, aquatic life, and other previously unobservable natural phenomena. Painlevé was widely known for his scientific films, which were shown in Parisian art cinemas. The 1928 film La Daphnie starts with a scene of a landscape with a river, and zooms in until the viewer can see the microbial realm invisible to the naked eye. You can watch it here.
In a review of Mouvements accélérés, the Surrealist Robert Desnos observed that Painlevé’s films instilled a sense of wonder by providing intimate perspectives of previously unknown or unfamiliar organisms and environments, drawing attention to our limited perception of reality. Both microscopic and telescopic lens development in this period showed that the reality we see with our eyes does not match the reality of the universe as revealed by science. Artists endorsing the Manifesto challenged themselves to expand their vision and leave behind old conceptions of the universe, while engaging their imaginations to visualize what these new realities and realms may look like.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Image Caption:Jean Painlevé, La Daphnie (The Daphnia), 1928, B&W film, silent, 8min 11s, Les Documents Cinématiques, Paris.
Art and Science in Community
Christopher B. Durr, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Amherst College
What can we teach each other?
This is the question that has been kicking around in my head since Dimensionism opened at the Mead. Too often it seems that we put ourselves into academic camps: artist or scientist, right-brained or left-brained, quantitative or creative. Once encamped we are reluctant to venture into unknown territory, frequently under the supposition we will not be welcome or that we are not “good enough” to be there. Perhaps, we believe that specialization is now the way of the world and the scientist must always be the scientist and the artist the artist.
Dimensionism shatters this idea. And what better place for it to be shattered than a liberal arts college like Amherst, a place that prides itself on opening its curriculum to free exploration of all subjects?
The exhibition shows us is what happens when scientists and artists work in community rather than isolation. One scientist in particular who contributed substantially to the movement was J.D. Bernal. A pioneer in the field of x-ray crystallography, Bernal studied the intricate chemical structure of biological molecules, and trained future Nobel laureates Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz. Bernal’s studies, and those of his contemporaries, showed in detail never before seen, how the molecular world is constructed. For the first time, we could create highly accurate models of molecules like penicillin, hemoglobin, and DNA. His writings on crystallography and his dedication to engaging the art community in conversation inspired numerous artists of the time. The artworks from Henry Moore (Stringed Figure), Naum Gabo (Vertical Construction No. 2) and Barbara Hepworth (Project for Wood and Strings, Trezion II) on display in the exhibition reflect the influence of crystallography. While all three pieces are distinct, they share a common theme of internal complexity. More broadly, and perhaps more importantly, they embody what happens when artists and scientists teach each other from their own unique perspectives.
My hope for Dimensionism is that it brings about a renaissance of sorts—a call to specialists everywhere to look up, out of their labs, out of their studios, and toward a new community, together.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Image Caption: Naum Gabo, Vertical Construction No. 2 (The Waterfall), 1965–66.
László Moholy-Nagy and the Dynamic-Constructive System of Forces
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
The previous blog post in this series show the important role Naum Gabo had in promoting the evolution of kinetic artwork in the early twentieth century. This post seeks to show how László Moholy-Nagy was also a critical force in promoting a new dynamism in the arts through the Dynamic-Constructive System of Forces Manifesto, which he co-authored in 1922. This proclamation argued that a new art composed of dynamic forces created through movement should replace the older, sculptural concern with material and form. As its ultimate goal, the manifesto cited the creation of a “floating” and “freely moving” artwork that would appear disconnected from the physical limitations imposed by Earth’s gravitational field. In response to this manifesto, Moholy-Nagy created his Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930), which later became known as the Light-Space Modulator. Originally intended as a prop for a film that would depict many moving patterns of reflected light, this work ultimately became known as a sculpture in its own right. Using light-projection technology, the object casts colored light onto its surroundings and creates the appearance of abstract and disembodied motion.
The central emphasis on light takes on a symbolic significance when read through Einstein’s theory of relativity, which uses the speed of light as a universal constant and defines the relationship of all events, past, present, and future, through its spatial delineation of the “light-cone.” By the time Moholy-Nagy created this work, he had already internalized the value of Einstein’s theory, and had even met with Einstein in 1924 to ask the scientist to write a general book on relativity for the Bauhaus. After Einstein declined, Moholy-Nagy took it upon himself to introduce the spatial and temporal implications of relativity in his 1928 book The New Vision as well as his 1947 text Vision in Motion.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Image Caption: László Moholy-Nagy, Light-Space Modulator, 1930.
Naum Gabo and the Realistic Manifesto
Galina Mardilovich, Curator of Russian & European Art, Mead Art Museum
Charles Sirató, author of the Dimensionist Manifesto, cited the important role several artists had in the evolution of the movement in his essay “History of the Dimensionist Manifesto.” Naum Gabo (1890–1977) was one of them, though he never actually signed Sirató’s document. Gabo was one of the first artists to advocate kinetic sculpture and highlighted this new movement in The Realistic Manifesto of 1920, co-authored with his brother Antoine Pevsner, also a sculptor. The introduction to this manifesto states:
“We proclaim: For us, space and time are born today. Space and time: the only forms where life is built, the only forms, therefore, where art should be erected . . ..The fulfillment of our perception of the world under the aspects of space and time: that is the only goal of our plastic creation.”
This emphasis on space-time evolved in response to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which Gabo had encountered while studying physics and engineering. Gabo’s Kinetic Sculpture (Standing Wave) is considered to be the first sculpture to incorporate mechanized movement. Featuring a single vertical rod set into the vibrating motion of a standing wave, the work is powered by an electromagnet and spring. When Gabo exhibited this sculpture in Berlin in 1922, he titled it Kinetic Construction(Time as a New Element of Plastic Art) as a way of emphasizing the new understanding of the fourth dimension as the space-time continuum.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Image Caption: Naum Gabo, Standing Wave, 1919.
Dimensionism Travels to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
It is with great excitement that we announce that Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein will open this autumn at its third and final venue, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where it will be on view from September 3, 2019–January 5, 2020. The final venue will include some exciting new artworks that were not part of the previous presentations, so we hope that even if you have seen the show in UC Berkeley’s BAMPFA or at the Mead you will come see its final presentation and attend some of the wonderful programs that will compliment the exhibition at the Zimmerli.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Image Caption: The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University
[Final Thoughts on Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein]
Final Thoughts on Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein
Vanja Malloy, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum
The traveling exhibition Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein closes at the Mead Art Museum on Sunday, July 28. For the next few days, the staff at the Mead, led by the collections manager, Stephen Fisher, and Preparator Tim Gilfillan will be working closely with art handlers and registrars from lending institutions to see that the seventy-four artworks (sixty-sixty of which are loans from thirty-five lenders!) are carefully de-installed and packed up for transport. Most of these artworks will continue to the exhibition’s third and final venue at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University where it will be on view September 3, 2019–January 5, 2020.
It has been a great honor for me to work on this exhibition and to witness how it has drawn new audiences to the museum. Many visitors came to see Dimensionism because of their interest in art, but many others came for a love of science. I believe this exhibition is compelling in the way it demonstrates how art and science are not distinct from one another, but rather are together an integral part of the human experience. By examining the influence of modern science on twentieth-century art, I hope that Dimensionism will challenge us to revisit how we tell the story of modern art, and which artists are part of that canon, but more fundamentally, that it allow us to create new dialogues between the arts and sciences, drawing into focus questions about how art and science can learn from each other, and what we gain by thinking more fluidly across disciplines and beyond our own areas of specialty.
Finally, since this the last post, I would like to take this opportunity to extend my thanks to a number of individuals in the making of the Dimensionism blog. Two colleagues have been instrumental in making this blog possible: Eric Danton, who carefully edited all the blog entries, and Danielle Amodeo, whose digital capabilities enabled the publication of this blog. I would also like to thank all of the guest authors who contributed insightful entries that widened our discussion of the art science exchange in the twentieth century, and offered their interdisciplinary perspective on this exciting material. Lastly, I would like to thank you, the reader, for following along. I hope the material, and discussion it has provided, have been interesting and useful, and that if you can, you come see the show at its final venue at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Image Caption: Professor Natasha Staller's class, The Modern World, visits the Mead for a talk with about Dimensionism with curator Vanja Malloy. Photo credit: Maria Stenzel.
