13
Ill
The new artists have been violently reproached for their geo
metric preoccupations. And yet, geometric figures are the
essence of drawing. Geometry, the science which has for its
scope space, its measurement and its relations, has been from time
immemorial the rule even of painting.
Up till now, the three dimensions of the euclidean geometry
have sufficed for the solicitude which the sentiment of the infinite
arouses in the soul of great artists.
The new painters do not propose, any more than did the old,
to be geometricians. But, it may be said that geometry is to the
plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today
scholars no longer hold to the three dimensions of the euclidean
geometries. The painters have been led quite naturally and, so
to speak, by intuition, to preoccupy themselvess with possible
new measures of space, which, in the language of modern studios
has been designated briefly and altogether by the term the fourth
dimension.
The fourth dimension as it is presented to the understanding
from the plastic point of view would be engendered by the three
known dimensions; it would show the immensity of space eter
nalized in every direction at a given moment. It is space itself,
the dimension of the infinite: it is this which endows objects with
their plasticity. It gives them the proportions which they merit
as a part of the whole, whereas, in Greek art, for example, a
somewhat mechanical rhythm unceasingly destroys the propor
tions.
Greek art had a purely human conception of beauty. It took
man as the standard of perfection. The art of the new painters
takes the infinite universe as the ideal, and it is this ideal that
necessitates a new measure of perfection, which permits the artist
to give to the object proportions which conform to the degree of
plasticity to which he desired to bring it.
Nietszche divined the possibility of such an art: “O divine
Dionysius, why dost thou pull my ears?” Ariadne demands of