Einstein, Picasso by Arthur Miller, Basic Books, $30, ISBN
0465018599
FOR PHYSICISTS, the opening decade of the 20th century brought the revolution
of Albert Einstein鈥檚 special theory of relativity and its startling assertions
about the nature of time and space. Around the same time Pablo Picasso was
making waves in the art world with his controversial Cubist painting Les
Demoiselles d鈥橝vignon. It, too, overturned conventional thinking.
Arthur Miller, professor of history and philosophy of science at University
College London, sees clear parallels between these two young men and the
creative forces that drove them. He examines the circumstances in which Einstein
and Picasso worked and the influences they shared, among them the writings of
French mathematician Henri Poincar茅 on non-Euclidean geometry. Picasso
himself considered the fractured perspectives of one of the 鈥渄emoiselles鈥� to be
a rendering on a flat canvas of a solid form seen from multiple viewpoints: 鈥渁
projection from the fourth dimension鈥�.
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Miller鈥檚 Einstein, Picasso presents new insights into the creative
processes common to a revolutionary scientist and a radical artist. 鈥淯ltimately
they were working on the same problem: how to represent space and time at just
the moment in history when it became apparent that these entities are not
what we intuitively perceive them to be.鈥�