In a 1949 essay, “Some Memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp,” Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia recalled the years before World War I as a time characterized by “an ebullience of invention, of exploration beyond the realm of the visible and the rational in every domain of the mind—science, psychology, imagination.” And she concluded, “It would seem, moreover, that in every field, a principal direction of the 20th century was the attempt to capture the ‘nonperceptible‘.” One aspect of that imperceptible reality was “the fourth dimension,” the popular idea that the three-dimensional world of perception was merely a section of a truer four-dimensional realm, a higher reality to be discovered by sensitive artists or by those possessed of some kind of “cosmic consciousness.” Although the importance of “the fourth dimension” for early modernism has been discussed frequently in recent years, little attention has been given to a second, equally important factor contributing to the preoccupation with supersensible reality in pre—World War I Paris: the discovery of x rays by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895.
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