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Cubism and the Fourth Dimension: a Myth in Modern Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

John Adkins Richardson
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Extract

Everyone who has anything to do with modern art recognizes the importance of Cubism, an importance that goes beyond the quality of individual pictures and resides in their bearing on the entire tradition of the past. Cubism not only changed the face of art for all the coming generation, it did so with a suddeness unprecedented in the history of artistic innovation. All other movements of so extreme a character had taken at least the lifetimes of two or three artists to accomplish their aims. Cubism became at once the most influential movement on the continent; within a decade it had run its course and made its impact. Nothing in the arts can compare with it. Still, it is not altogether singular.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 17 , Issue 65 , March 1969 , pp. 99 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Sam Hunger, Modern French Painting (New York, 1956), p. 194.

2 See Robert Zimmermann, Henry More und die vierte Dimension des Raumes (Vienna, 1881), passim.

3 Felix Klein, Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint, vol. II, trans. Charles A. Noble (New York, 1939), pp. 62-63.

4 See Edward Fry, Cubism (New York, 1966), p. 119.

5 Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes (Paris, 1913), p. 25.

6 Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), passim.

7 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York, 1932), pp. 3-4.

8 Ibid

9 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge, 1941), p. 357.

10 Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus (Munich, 1920), pp. 29-31.

11 L. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, 1947), pp. 113-128, 266.

12 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme (Paris, 1912), p. 13.

13 Jean Metzinger, " Cubisme et tradition," Paris-Journal, 18 August 1911; trans. in Edward Fry, Cubism (New York, 1966), pp. 66-67.

14 Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function; Einstein's Theory of Relativity (New York, 1933), pp. 448-449.

15 Albert Einstein, Generalization of Gravitation Theory, Appendix II, from The Meaning of Relativity (Princeton, 1953), p. 163.

16 Paul M. Laporte, "Cubism and Relativity," Art Journal, Vol. XXV, No. 3 (Spring, 1966), pp. 246-248.

17 Paul M. Laporte, "The Space Time Concept in the Work of Picasso," Magazine of Art, Vol. 41, No. 1 (January 1948), pp. 25 ff. and "Cubism and Science," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. VII, No. 3 (March, 1949), pp. 243 ff.

18 Laporte quotes a statement from Morris Davidson who says that Henri Bergson's ideas of relativity preceded Einstein's. (The fact that Bergson once commented that his durée and Einstein's time had no connection seems to be overlooked). Laporte remarks, grauitously, that he believes "the closest analogy to Bergson may be found in Van Gogh." Perhaps. But for what it's worth, Bergson revealed, during the course of an interview with Jean Wahl, that his favorite picture was Velasquez's Spinners because of the rendering of the moving wheel. For him it demonstrated that an object in motion is in a different state of existence than one at rest.

19 See Fritz Novotny, Cézanne und das Ende der wissenschaftlichen Perspektive (Vienna, 1938), passim.