Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein

(Hardback)

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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 metareality that went beyond human perception into unseen dimensions. In 1936, the Hungarian poet Charles Sirat authored the Dimensionist Manifesto, signaling 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 systematize 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, Cesar Domela, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Mir , Laszl 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. The book, which accompanies 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 Sirat '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 Sirat 's own "History of the Dimensionist Manifesto," written in 1966. The book brings aa 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, Cesar Domela, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Max Ernst, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerome Kamrowski, Frederick Kann, Helen Lundeberg, Man Ray, Andre Masson, Roberto Matta, Herbert Matter, Joan Mir , Laszl 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 Sirat , Will Henry Stevens, Patrick Sullivan, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning Copublished with the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

Reviews

Dimensionism, thecompanion catalogue to an exhibition of the same name produced by Amherst College's Mead Art Museum,provides a comprehensive assessment of an important but overlooked effort to reconcile into a 'single common law' the ideals of modernist art and a reality of relativity and uncertainty as described in quantum physics.

Author Bio

Vanja V. Malloy is Curator of American Art at Amherst College's Mead Art Museum. She was previously Chester Dale Fellow in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Linda Dalrymple Henderson is David Bruton, Jr., Centennial Professor in Art History and Regents Outstanding Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Duchamp in Context- Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works and Reimagining Space- The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York and coeditor of From Energy to Information- Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature.