Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc

  • Arthur I Miller
Basic Books: 2001. 320 pp. $30

The opening decade of the twentieth-century continues to hold a profound attraction for intellectual and cultural historians. It is not simply that obvious and major changes in painting, literature and music occurred at this time — the advent of modernism in Western culture — but that these changes seem so dramatically abrupt and, moreover, in some senses related to one another. The bolder souls among us also wish to include the sciences within this movement, so that the years 1905–09 witnessed a triple revolution at least, consisting of the departures initiated in painting by Picasso, Braque and Matisse in Paris, in music by Schönberg in Vienna, and in physics by Einstein in Bern.

Credit: DAVID NEWTON

Arthur Miller draws on his own substantial researches on the history of physics in this period to focus on two figures, Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein. And, ultimately, on two key works — Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 and Einstein's 1905 epoch-making paper describing special relativity, “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies”. Miller's account proposes a definite historical relationship between the work of his two creative heroes. He contends that both depended significantly on a preoccupation with geometry, and that this preoccupation had its basis in the work of the great French philosopher–mathematician Henri Poincaré. Miller is not implying that there was any communicative influence acting between Picasso and Einstein, but that their common preoccupations had an underlying common cause.

Miller provides fascinating and thorough accounts of the conception, gestation and delivery of the key works. He supplements them with two further types of material. Interested in personal creativity, he gives biographically based accounts of his protagonists. He also adds contextual detail on the cultural, philosophical and scientific environments that bore strongly on Picasso's and Einstein's developing ideas. So we are informed not only of the technical significance of ether-drift experiments and the Lorenz contraction, of primitivist and photographically derived aesthetics, but equally of the significance of the bohemian, hashish-devoted culture that existed in Paris's Montmartre, where Picasso spent much of this period, and of Einstein's and Picasso's love-lives. All this adds considerably to the book's readability and interest, and turns what could have been a rather dry and testing disquisition on geometrical technicalities into a lively and often compelling narrative. It captures what Miller clearly feels to be the sheer, exhilarating excitement of those times, places and events.

Both Einstein and Picasso are, of course, massively archived and researched figures, and Miller's analysis of their achievements makes substantial and commendable use of the most recent research on Picasso — particularly that of Anne Baldassari on Picasso's photography, and John Richardson's biography. But Miller adds something significant of his own about the geometric origins and development of Les Demoiselles. He identifies a plausible means by which the content of Poincaré's La Science et l'Hypothèse could have reached Picasso, who in those years did not have a strong grasp of the French language. Maurice Princet, a mathematically learned actuary, was a member of Picasso's circle of intimates, la bande à Picasso. And, according to Miller, it was Princet who told Picasso about the non-euclidean and four-dimensional geometrical speculations of Poincaré and also of the French mathematician Esprit Joffre in a way that stimulated Picasso's ambitions to apply them to his painting.

This is a valuable nugget of historical research, and is generally persuasive. If one additionally buys into Miller's unabashedly Romantic, genius-led views of creativity and historical change, then his book offers an account of Picasso in Paris that is both new and convincing, with the added bonus of having Einstein in the same interpretive frame.

It is possible, nonetheless, to accept Miller's factual findings while remaining sceptical about his overall interpretation. When questioned, Picasso persistently and over a long period denied a geometric or scientific inspiration for Les Demoiselles. Miller's special pleading, that Picasso was not asked the question in the right way, is hardly convincing. It would be more to the point simply to insist that Les Demoiselles is a geometrical composition: the presentation of space and objects in the painting are well described as geometrical, despite Picasso's disavowal. But a larger difficulty concerns the kind of geometry involved. It is very difficult to maintain, with Miller, that a poincaresque 'four-dimensional' form is in play. Rather, three-dimensional depths, visually inaccessible in pictorial terms, are unfolded to the two-dimensional flatness of the picture plane, giving the viewer the impression of seeing the picture from several perspectives, and thereby enhancing its visual effect. This is complemented by the fact that objects in the picture are geometrically broken up through the faceting that Picasso applied. Although it is interesting that contemporary occultists perceived four dimensions to the picture, this is difficult to validate from the point of view of the picture's composition. And it leaves open the question of how fundamental, or otherwise, is its derivation from Poincaré.

Perhaps surprisingly, the case for Einstein appears even more questionable. Although Poincaré's place in the prehistory of special relativity is long acknowledged, there is the stumbling block that Einstein's Special Theory is not presented geometrically by Einstein. He treated electrodynamics not in any markedly geometrical way but rather by an abstract reconsideration of the relations between rigid rods, perfect clocks and light signals — that is, by proposing a theory of measurement that respecified the nature and meaning of fundamental physical quantities.

Miller's argument may be on stronger ground at a later period — with the formulation of analytical cubism by Picasso and Georges Braque, and with general relativity's fundamental space–time geometry. But for the main period on which the book focuses, 1905–07, his case, however vigorously and enjoyably portrayed, remains tantalizingly unmade.