Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein

Hardcover | 18.42 x 2.95 x 23.65 cm | 328 pp

MIT Press | 2018 | 9780262038478

The first book to document how artists of the early twentieth century responded to new scientific conceptions of reality.

In the early twentieth century, influenced by advances in science that included Einstein's theory of relativity and newly powerful microscopic and telescopic lenses, artists were inspired to expand their art―to capture a new meta-reality that went beyond human perception into unseen dimensions. In 1936, the Hungarian poet Charles Sirató authored the Dimensionist Manifesto, signalling a new movement that called on artists to transcend “all the old borders and barriers of the arts.” The manifesto was the first attempt to systematise the mass of changes that we now call modern art, and was endorsed by an impressive array of artists, including Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, César Domela, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, László Moholy-Nagy, Ben Nicholson, Enrico Prampolini, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Dimensionism is the first book in English to explore how these and other “Dimensionists” responded to the scientific breakthroughs of their era.

This book, which accompanied a traveling exhibition, reproduces works by the manifesto's initial endorsers and by such artists as Georges Braque, Joseph Cornell, Helen Lundeberg, Man Ray, Herbert Matter, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso, Kay Sage, Patrick Sullivan, and Dorothea Tanning. It also offers essays by prominent art historians that examine Sirató's now almost-forgotten text and the artists who searched for a means of expression that obliterated old conceptions and parameters.

Appearing for the first time in English is Sirató's own History of the Dimensionist Manifesto, written in 1966. The book brings a long-forgotten voice and text back into circulation.

Artists
Alexander Archipenko, Jean Arp, Herbert Bayer, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, John Covert, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, César Domela, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Max Ernst, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerome Kamrowski, Frederick Kann, Helen Lundeberg, Man Ray, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Herbert Matter, Joan Miró, László Moholy-Nagy, Henry Moore, Nina Negri, Ben Nicholson, Isamu Noguchi, Gordon Onslow Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, Antoine Pevsner, Pablo Picasso, Enrico Prampolini, Anton Prinner, Kay Sage, Charles Sirató, Will Henry Stevens, Patrick Sullivan, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning