Golubov was raised in an orthodox Hasidic household and was introduced to Jewish mysticism at a very young age by his parents, later embracing the Kabala, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, American Transcendentalism, Plato, Spinoza, Bergson, and other philosophers and philosophies of the absolute, the infinite and the metaphysical. He said that he had believed in mysticism from the beginning, “the mysteries of the unseen world always very near to me.” He was also, even as a child, a gifted mimetic artist, copying illustrations by Gustave Doré pictured in a Bible that he found in the family barn.  But it was “abstraction,” Golubov wrote in an undated manuscript, that “became my true realism,” the realist co-existing with the metaphysician. Seeing no conflict between the figurative and the non-objective, his resolutions were unlike those of any of his contemporaries. He said: “I was self-taught in my painting, which might be described as realistic, expressionistic, abstract, non-objective and surrealistic. I was trying to reconcile all these tendencies…The results were, and still are, metaphysical-non-objective and metaphysical-figurative.   How I hate all these terms! But how else to describe it?”  

Francis V. O’Connor noted, in Maurice Golubov (1905-1987), His Abstract and Figurative Art: An Interpretive Essay, that “Golubov’s art can be seen as a continuous dialectic between what he wants to emphasize as meaningful — as he does in his expressionist figurative works that reflect his fraught boyhood in Russia as a refugee — and in his geometric abstractions, where he reduces his subject to the omission of everything but the design and color to reveal a “4th Dimension” of reality as he understands it. But it will become apparent that he is an expressionist at heart, utilizing three modes of painting: 1) the rows of figures he calls both ‘wanderers’ and ‘metaphysical,’ 2) the non-objective abstract designs, where he uses color and painterly facture within the designs to enliven his dimensional beliefs — which he also calls ‘metaphysical,’ and 3) geometric designs that are painted in an overall painterly manner that softens their linear structures with facture and color.”

The fourth dimension intrigued Golubov, a theoretical discourse of vital significance in the annals of early Modernism. Many artists and intellectuals at the time read Charles Howard Hinton and P.D. Ouspensky, two early proponents of higher dimensions and the spiritual who influenced Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian and countless others. Indeed, Ouspensky’s observation seems restated in Golubov’s discussion of  “an illogically logical possibility of a world arrested in many endless moments into one whole instant moment.” 

The fourth dimension offered an escape from gravity and a point of view from where to see objects as if from multiple directions simultaneously. Not only was Golubov interested in imagining flight, but his fourth-dimensional figure exists in “every possible position such as top, bottom, this side—that side—any side—the depth of any direction,” he declared. He was immersed in the three-dimensional world also but it was not enough in itself, working and experimenting “endlessly to find a key to enter the fourth dimensional hidden world behind the third” and see if it could be expressed in art that would enable him “to explore a rich mysterious unknown world.”

Golubov chose a diamond shape as a fitting fourth dimensional figure. As a square on its side, it had greater dynamism and potentiality. He called it a symbol of four dimensions in “a surface way” and the introduction of a circular or spiral movement into it “will naturally go into depth,” however indeterminate, the circle or spiral exploring “every possible space in and around it.” In an audacious solution, Golubov used the spiral to visually and emblematically break apart the cube’s three-dimensional restrictions through the implication of movement in space and time. Golubov invented “a unique way to overcome the containing faces of the cube by using the spiral to imaginatively pierce each face and extend space outward or inward from that plane,” Linda Dalrymple Henderson observed in her essay, Maurice Golubov and the Fourth Dimension. “He then suggested the simultaneous combinations of views that would result in an unprecedented, transparent intersection of multiple spaces…a highly original contribution to the rich painterly tradition of grappling with higher dimensions.”