Fourth Dimension in Art

“If you can imagine a point moving, it becomes a line. A line becomes a surface and a surface becomes a cube. If you move the cube, this is infinite already because you are suggesting freedom.”

- Maurice Golubov on the “fourth dimension”

All we ever look around and see or notice is in 3 Dimensions or an interpretation of the same in 2-Dimensional Plane. I found it personally very intriguing about art in 4 Dimensions. I’ll try to show below the best possible and understandable representation of 4-dimensional art in a 2-Dimensional Picture.

When the concept of Fourth Dimension came into existence upon thoughts of theorists, it was one of the most difficult things to visualize it, many artists from back in the day took it as a challenge to portray their level best of it.

This really intrigued me. Art, as we think of it, comes from real life incidents or vivid thoughts, but art of something which cannot be experienced, felt, seen or even visualized. How special it would be. I hope you all enjoy reading as much as I did researching and learning about it.

The human brain is only designed to interpret what is sees, and all of what our eyes see is 3-dimensional space, but they’ve also gotten accustomed to representations of the same in 2 dimensions, still not proficient at it though. It is extremely hard for a human brain to think and interpret another dimension, since we’ve never come across a 4-Dimensional space which bewilders our imagination.

Note that the thought of another dimension is not that recent, its been in discussion and thought since the past 7 decades.

Dalí’s Crucifixion (Corpus Hybercubus)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion(CorpusHypercubus)

A very special and one of its kind painting from 1954 by the surrealist Salvador Dalí. He often cited the painting to be “an explosive, nuclear and hypercubic” crucifixion scene. Not only that, in the summer of 1953, he proudly exclaimed that the painting will be “the great metaphysical work of [his] summer”

Talking about the painting itself after neglecting the religious values or associations, one would notice that the figure of Jesus is crucified to the shadow of the so-called 4 Dimensional Cube or Tesseract.

Lets talk about how in everyday life we represent 3-D shapes/figures in a 2D plane. In a very simple fashion, the representations of 3 dimensional objects in a 2D plane is nothing but a shadow of the object on the 2D plane. If we logically follow the same for the fourth dimension then we’d notice that the shadow/representation of the fourth dimension can be done in 3D only.

Taking an example, we know that a 3D cube can be opened by its faces in a 2D plane somewhat like this

Now similarly if we want to open a 4D cube called tesseract, in a 3D space, we will get something of this sort

This is exactly what we see Dali doing back in 1954 with his painting. His sheer interest in mathematics, theoretical physics is depicted in his artwork. This masterpiece of his has often accredited him to “have found new meaning in a traditional biblical scene by breaking out of three dimensions.”

Quoting from http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160511-the-painter-who-entered-the-fourth-dimension ,

“There are no nails in this image of crucifixion, and the cross is not made of wood. It’s not even in a dimension we can see.

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) unites a classical portrayal of Christ with a shape that only exists in mathematical theory. Dalí’s floating cross is what Banchoff describes as “an unfolded four-dimensional cube”

It indeed is a marvel.

Pablo Picasso’s 1910 Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension_in_art

Another one of Picasso’s masterpieces, he tries to explore the unknown, the dimension we can’t experience and helps to give us an example of the asymmetry through mere oil paints on a canvas.

Albert Gleizes’ 1913, Portrait de l’éditeur Eugène Figuière

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_dimension_in_art

Not so after Picasso, Albert Gleizes unveiled his masterpiece interpreting the same unknown dimensions of art and reality.

Extra Information:

Another very cool piece of art is this

No, its not a piece of lab equipment, it’s a piece of art so unique that its mind boggling. This is what is called a Klein Bottle, it’s a 3D shadow of 4D Mobius’ Loop.

We might find that the part of bottle goes from inside itself in 3D but it just goes around in 4th dimension. “If your head isn’t paining by now, you might not be paying attention.”

Funfact: This shape has only one surface, try thinking why.

Bored of a 3D cube? If you want to try your hands on something even cooler, I’d recommend trying this 4D Rubik’s cube here Magic Cube 4D

And if even that’s not enough, there exists a 5D version too — MagicCube5D

If anyone find this intriguing and interesting, I’d highly recommend watching “Four Dimensional Maths: Things to See and Hear in the Fourth Dimension — with Matt Parker” on YouTube

Just open the link as it starts from the right time in the video to learn about 4th dimensional mathematics.

Hope 4th Dimension treated you well and you learned something artistically new.