Exploding Tongues: Language, Art, and the Russian Avant-garde

(Hyper)cubism?

The ideas of the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry were a popular scientific, literary, and artistic cultural phenomenon throughout Europe at the dawn of the 20th century. As such certain aspects of these ideas were incorporated into the then-developing Cubist theories. The "freedom" of geometries not constrained by convention or Euclid's three dimensions was particularly appealing to artists of the movement. Farther East, the philosophical and mystical - in addition to mathematical - elements of a spatial fourth dimension as described by the writings of Peter Ouspensky were extremely influential to several artists and styles of the Russian Avant-garde. Suprematist pieces by Kazimir Malevich, and Rayist works by Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova exhibit particularly notable parallels. Highly geometrical, jagged, and acute lines as well as abstract color masses are used to suggest a reconciliation of human perception and the unknowable fourth dimension - an intuition of new meaning and understanding from recognizable fragments. 

Malevich's Futurist piece, "Death of a man simultaneously on an airplane and the railway" as well as Larionov's "Glass" and Goncharova's "Green and Blue Forest" exhibit thematic and physical elements of the fourth dimension with obvious parallels to Ouspensky's ideas and writings. Upon examining these qualities within these early pieces of the Russian Avant-garde and similar ones in later works such as Vasily Kamensky's "Tango With Cows" and Ilia Zdanevich's "As Though Zga", it is clear that several elements of fourth dimensionality persisted throughout the artistic movement. Tango With Cows exhibits qualities seen in Malevich's Futurist piece as well as Larionov and Goncharova's Rayist pieces. (This will be far less clustered as I fill in text.)

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