Interior of the Fourth Dimension, 1913

In January 1909, Max Weber returned to New York City after an extended stay in Paris, where he had associated with the avant-garde circle of Guillaume Apollinaire (French, 1880 - 1918), Robert Delaunay (French, 1885 - 1941), Jean Metzinger, and Albert Gleizes (French, 1881 - 1953). He had been particularly impressed by the early cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881 - 1973). Like his American modernist contemporaries John Marin (American, 1870 - 1953), Joseph Stella (American, 1877 - 1946), and Abraham Walkowitz (American, 1880 - 1965), Weber regarded New York as a city of the future. For these artists, New York’s skyscrapers, public transport systems, terminals, and suspension bridges lent themselves to being interpreted in the same semiabstract style that Delaunay had used to depict the Eiffel Tower in Paris.[1]  [1]
For a summary of artists’ attitudes regarding New York, see Wanda M. Corn, “The Artist’s New York: 1900–1930,” in Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870–1930, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (New York, 1994), 275–308. In New York, Weber’s choice of urban subject was reinforced by his association with Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864 - 1946) at the 291 gallery and through the direct encouragement of his close friend the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn (British, born United States, 1882 - 1966).

Interior of the Fourth Dimension is justly considered “one of Weber’s most intriguing scenes of New York.”[2]  [2]
Percy North, Max Weber: American Modern (New York, 1982), 57. In the bottom foreground a ship enters the city’s vast harbor at night, surrounded by towering skyscrapers. The form directly above the ship, between the two masses of buildings, is probably a bridge. Weber’s incandescent metropolis resembles a Gothic cathedral set against dark voids, like parting curtains, at the left and right edges.[3]  [3]
This analogy was made by Marla Prather in Art for the Nation: Gifts in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC, 1991), 288. The complex interpenetration of planes unites the buildings, ship, and bay into a single, vital entity. Weber placed great emphasis on powerful beams of electric light, tracing their path as they pierce and fragment buildings before descending into the bay. Scholar and curator Percy North has suggested that this visualization of light was inspired by the artist’s familiarity with the special electrification effects used during the 300th anniversary celebrations of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the Hudson River in 1909.[4]  [4]
Percy North, Max Weber: The Cubist Decade, 1910–1920 (Atlanta, GA, 1991), 46n72. The event is described in David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 62.

Unlike orthodox analytical cubism, in which the fragmentation of solid matter is achieved through a methodical breakdown of its structure, Weber’s adaptation of the style has an expressionistic quality. He likely derived the high vantage point from Coburn, who had made an important series of photographs of Manhattan from the tops of skyscrapers.[5]  [5]
For a discussion of Coburn’s influence on Weber, see Percy North, Max Weber: The Cubist Decade, 1910–1920 (Atlanta, GA, 1991), 31–34. An example of one of the photographs in Coburn’s series is The Octopus (1912, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Weber’s description of his later New York at Night [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Max Weber, New York at Night, 1915, oil on canvas, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Mari and James A. Michener, 1991.338. Photo by Rick Hall applies equally well to Interior of the Fourth Dimension: “Electrically illuminated contours of buildings, rising height upon height against the blackness of sky now diffused, now interknotted, now pierced by occasional shafts of colored light. Altogether—a web of colored geometric shapes, characteristic only of the Grand Canyons of New York at Night.”[6]  [6]
Weber quoted in Alfred H. Barr, Max Weber Retrospective Exhibition, 1907–1930 (New York, 1930), 16.

The painting takes its title from a pseudoscientific theory, derived from Einstein’s theory of relativity, that had been current among avant-garde artists during Weber’s last year in Paris. Weber wrote the first published discussion of the concept in an influential one-page treatise that appeared in a 1910 issue of Camera Work:

In plastic art, I believe, there is a fourth dimension which may be described as the consciousness of a great and overwhelming sense of space-magnitude in all directions at one time, and is brought into existence through the three known measurements. It is not a physical entity or a mathematical hypothesis, nor an optical illusion. It is real, and can be perceived and felt. It exists outside and in the presence of objects, and is the space that envelops a tree, a tower, a mountain, or any solid; or the intervals between objects or volumes of matter if receptively beheld. It is somewhat similar to color and depth in musical sounds. It arouses imagination and stirs emotion. It is the immensity of all things. It is the ideal measurement, and is therefore as great as the ideal, perceptive or imaginative faculties of the creator, architect, sculptor, or painter.[7]  [7]
Max Weber, “The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View,” Camera Work 31 (1910): 25.

In the same article, Weber further noted that “this boundless sense of space or grandeur” and “dimension of infinity” was universally present in the art and architecture (including the “tunnels, bridges, and towers”) of different historical eras and cultures. He stipulated that although the fourth dimension was spiritual, it arose from perceived reality: “The ideal dimension is dependent for its existence upon the three material dimensions, and is created entirely through plastic means, colored and constructed matter in space and light. Life and its visions can only be realized and made possible through matter.”[8]  [8]
Max Weber, “The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View,” Camera Work 31 (1910): 25. The full text is quoted in Percy North, Max Weber: The Cubist Decade, 1910–1920 (Atlanta, GA, 1991), 95. Weber’s article was translated into French, quoted, and discussed by Guillaume Apollinaire in Les Peintres Cubistes: Meditations esthetiques (Paris, 1913). For a discussion and comparison of the texts, see Willard Bohn, “In Pursuit of the Fourth Dimension: Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Weber,” Arts Magazine 54 (June 1980), 166–169. For a discussion of the fourth dimension, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “A New Facet of Cubism: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry Reinterpreted,” Art Quarterly 25 (Winter 1971): 410–433, an article that was later incorporated into her book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ, 1983). When Interior of the Fourth Dimension was exhibited in Baltimore in 1915 (where a reviewer pronounced it “the most abstruse, obscure thing on the walls”), Weber was quoted as having specified that the interior of the fourth dimension “is the space around an art form which is stirred by the essence with which that form was vested by the artist.”[9]  [9]
W. W. B., Baltimore News, March 14, 1915, quoted but not identified in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 176. The reviewer praised some of the more conservative works Weber had executed prior to leaving for Paris and opined that Interior of the Fourth Dimension was “incomprehensible”; he found the artist’s deliberate departure from naturalism “as purposeless as it would be, say, if Bernard Shaw deserted English to write his plays in Cingalese. The fact that Cingalese may be a beautiful language and that it might, by some queer turn, become the vogue would hardly condone or justify such an act.”

Interior of the Fourth Dimension possesses a grandeur consistent with the artist’s mystical theory but atypical of European analytical cubist painting. Modern art scholar Dominic Ricciotti has argued, “In an effort to signify the interrelatedness of time and space, Weber achieves a motion that is effectively Futurist.”[10]  [10]
Dominic Ricciotti, “The Revolution in Urban Transport: Max Weber and Italian Futurism,” American Art Journal 16 (Winter 1984): 50. In comparison to the artist’s later futurist-influenced paintings such as Rush Hour, New York, however, the imagery in Interior of the Fourth Dimension is static and symmetrical. The components of the fragmented cityscape form a cohesive whole that is stable rather than in motion. The painting’s most prominent lines reflect the power and energy of electrification, serving a function distinctly different from futurist “lines of force” that indicate the chaos of the modern urban environment. Weber’s use of other lines that suggest sequential motion may reflect the influence of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art), which he had seen at the Armory Show earlier in 1913.[11]  [11]
Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 176. In Interior of the Fourth Dimension, Weber celebrated the vitality of the city while centering and grounding the scene in a stagelike arrangement. By activating the spaces between and around the elements of his composition (bridge and buildings, ship, and beams of light), Weber made the theory of the fourth dimension visual and vibrant.

Weber’s preparatory gouache study for this painting is in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] Max Weber, Interior of the Fourth Dimension, 1913, transparent and opaque watercolor over black crayon, Baltimore Museum of Art, Saidie A. May Bequest Fund, 1970.42. Photo by Mitro Hood. At larger than half scale and with the complexity of the final painting, the gouache reveals Weber’s nearly fully developed ideas for the oil on canvas.

Robert Torchia

July 24, 2024