Linda Henderson
Photo: Annette Hornischer

David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History and Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Professor, The University of Texas at Austin

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow - Class of Spring 2014

Linda Henderson has taught European and American art at the University of Texas at Austin since 1978, focusing on the relation of modern art to fields such as geometry, science and technology, and mystical and occult philosophies. After receiving a PhD from Yale University, in 1975, Henderson served as Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, until 1977. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, 1983; revised ed., MIT, 2013) and Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton, 1998). She also co-edited From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford, 2002), an anthology on the cultural impact of scientific developments such as thermodynamics, ether/electromagnetism, cybernetics, and virtual reality. A 1988-89 Guggenheim Fellow, Henderson is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at the University of Texas and received a Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award in 2009. In spring 2010 and 2011 Henderson was a Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, where she is now a member of the Advisory Board.

Project Description

The Energies of Modernism: Art, Science, and Occultism in the Early Twentieth Century

Henderson’s Academy project, “The Energies of Modernism,” will be the first major study of the science and occultism that were central to modern artists’ understanding of reality and to the new languages they invented to embody it. Avant-garde artists of the twentieth century shared a common culture of popularized science that has been virtually ignored in histories of modern art. Her project looks to two central concepts animating the popular mind of the time: the “ether” and the spatial fourth dimension. Both would come to an end with Einstein’s ideas, which challenged the existence of the “ether,” in 1919, fifteen years after the publication of his Special Relativity Theory; he ultimately demystified the fourth dimension simply as “time.” Nevertheless, modern artists and the public were largely unaware of Special Relativity Theory, and they continued to operate in the fading worldview of Victorian ether physics and be exhilarated by scientific discoveries like Xrays, radioactivity, and wireless telegraphy. Ether thus remained central to the contemporary understanding of both space and matter: permeating space and a vehicle for vibrating electromagnetic waves, the ether was even postulated as the source of matter itself. In this world of porous boundaries between space and matter, and meta-realities beyond vision, it is little wonder that occultists delved into the latest science and that artists were inspired by it.

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