Flatland, Color in Early Modern Art by Linda Henderson

The Wednesday Evening Color Salons are a public speaker series presented as part of The New Color, a course taught by Luanne Stovall, artist and color theorist. Each salon will pair a guest speaker with a color-focused topic. On Feb. 6, the salon series welcomes UT Art History Professor Linda Henderson. 

The New Color celebrates the Bauhaus Centennial (1919–1933), the German Art + Design School that pioneered modern design. This course offers a multidisciplinary way to explore the dense networks of color codes coursing through our lives and gain practical color competencies for 21st century color applications—not just for artists and designers but everyone.

The living color field is positioned at the intersection of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM Learning Model). The goal is to provide color competencies for visual literacy. 

Print out your own poster for the Wednesday Evening Color Salons, using our PDF.  

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History, earned her PhD at Yale University and has taught 20th-century art in the Department of Art and Art History since 1978. Before coming to the University of Texas, she served from 1974 through 1977 as Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Professor Henderson’s research and teaching focus on modern art and modernism, more generally, in relation to their broader cultural context, including ideas such as “the fourth dimension,” the history of science and technology, and mystical and occult philosophies. In addition to journal articles and essays, she is the author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press, 1983; new, enlarged ed., MIT Press, 2013) and Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton, 1998), a first prize winner in the Robert W. Hamilton Author Awards competition in 1999. In 2008 she organized the exhibition Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York for UT’s Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, which recovered the history and art of this innovative group of artists who collaborated in New York from 1962 to 1967.

In 2013 MIT Press published a new edition of Professor Henderson’s 1983 The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, which features a 100-page “Reintroduction” augmenting the original book’s scientific context as well as expanding its coverage to the period 1950-2000. From topics such as the connections drawn in the late 19th and early 20th-century between a possible fourth dimension and the ether of space, the new text moves forward to trace the gradual resurgence of interest in a spatial fourth dimension in popular culture in the 1950s-1960s, including at the Park Place Gallery. With the fourth dimension having been redefined as time versus space in Relativity Theory, interest in higher spatial dimensions nonetheless reemerged with gusto in the context of string theory in physics and computer graphics beginning in the 1980s.