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

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Summary: Creativity and the Mind
Review: A brilliant book for a discussion between the relationship between the art and science.

Maybe we can not be an Einstein or Picasso, but there is a lot to learn about their creative spirit.

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Summary: Great minds think alike.
Review: Arthur Miller is a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at London's University College. Equal parts biography and art-science history, his interesting book follows the parallel lives of physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) into the 20th Century. Although the two lives never actually intersected, Miller demonstrates that as a result of the intellectual atmosphere of 1905, Einstein and Picasso "began exploring new notions of space and time almost coincidentally" (p. 4). "I wrote EINSTEIN, PICASSO," Miller tells us, "for lovers of art and science practiced at their most fundamental and exciting level, for aficionados of thinking across disciplines and generally for readers interested in the drama of high creativity. We wonder about the moment when everything comes together to produce incredible insights. How does this happen? How do thoughts emerge that go beyond the information at hand?" (p. 8).

While it does not ultimately succeed as a biography in bringing either Einstein or Picasso to life in its 357 pages, Miller's book shows that his subjects were able to achieve "enormous successes under conditions that would have defeated most people" (p. 266), and to this limited extent, Miller gives us insight into what made both men tick. However, Miller's real strength is in exploring how Einstein and Picasso "processed information in order to make their momentous breakthroughs" (p. 245) resulting in Einstein's 1905 theory of relativity, and the cubism of Picasso's 1907 painting, "Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon." The theory of relativity, like cubism, Miller shows, represents "a profound response to changes in the philosophical and scientific climate as well as to dramatic technological innovations" (p. 174). While his book demonstrates time and again how Einstein and Picasso were equally fond of work and women, it only really soars when it reveals how these two men were able to simultaneously move the world into modernity through science and art.

G. Merritt

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Summary: Einstein and Picasso - no premise for comparison
Review: In an attempt to seek commonality between Picasso and Einstein, the author fails to leave the reader with the revolutionary nature of Einstein's legacy; precisely why Einstein's ideas were counterintuitive and what its implications for science were. I was disappointed that I did not get a better grasp of this subject matter than before I read the book (I am not a physicist). Einstein was truly a genius because he was able to predict physical phenomena later borne out by empirical observations. Picasso was at best creative and his "legacy" was a new representation of art that is entirely subjective. The author makes conjectures of Picasso's connection to philosophy and science but this is like saying that Bin Laden and Gandhi are similar because both believe in some form of self determination. Picasso's thought processes appear divergent. This is not genius. The poor explanation of Einstein's theories and its implications results in this superficial equating of genius with the "creative". I suppose in a sense the author has succeeded in showing us that when you equate genius with the scandalous hell-raiser you are bound to come up short. This is injustice to Einstein and scientific thought.
While I disagree with the author's basic premise, he has done a fine job of collecting information about the historical aspects of each person's life, placing them in the context of the sociological environment of the twentieth century . He describes many of the key scientific discoveries of those times and has made me eager to learn more about the evolution of scientific thought and advances.

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Summary: A Brilliant Point of View
Review: Miller's central theme is that Picasso, like Einstein, was inspired by the emerging ideas of time, space, and the fourth dimension. In his effort to find parallels in the roles the two men played in their respective fields, the author becomes carried away with twisted logic and hyperbole. He tells us, for example, that Picasso's ideas, such as cutting a piece of newspaper in the shape of an arm and gluing it to a picture of a guitar, were "break-throughs" on a par with Galileo's conception of the solar system. We are told that Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon incorporated concepts of relativity and the fourth dimension that the author and his friends found in the work of Henri Poincare. They are said to have passed many hours in a cafe exploring the intricacies of advanced mathematics and physics. One wonders whether a more likely influence on Picasso's thought might have been the drugs he is said to have been taking. In trying to contrive a parallel between the contributions of Einstein and Picasso, Miller overlooks a fundamental difference between science and art. Science is progressive; art is cumulative. Each new scientific contribution builds on what has gone before, replacing old ideas with new ones. An innovative work of art does not make earlier work outdated. It simply adds to a gallery that includes centuries of work by artists in countless different cultures. Thus when Picasso rejected the rules of perspective and painted a nude woman as a geometrical figure with eyes in the back of its head he was not discovering new principles that made all that had gone before obsolete. He was simply introducing yet another mode of artistic expression.

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Summary: Thinking Differently
Review: The idea behind this book is fetching, perhaps compelling: to explore the relations between the work of Einstein and the work of Picasso. Unfortunately, it would take a brilliant and inquisitive mind to do justice to this subject, and the author does not have one of these around to deploy. To judge from his writing, he is one of these academic mediocrities who actually think that "how geniuses get their ideas" is a fascinating question, and he also seems to believe that the quality of a man's poetry will closely depend on which Left Bank cafe he patronizes. ("All the avant-garde poets of that time went to the Bateau Ivre.) After ten or twenty pages describing Picasso's early life, his apartments, and his mistresses, I decided that his was not the book I wanted.

It may work fine for you!

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Summary: strains to equate two rather different lives
Review: The idea that there may be a connection between the appearance of relativity and cubism at the beginning of the twentieth century is not a new one. Though it has been shown quite convincingly that Picasso was not aware of Einstein's work when he and Braque invented cubism, it is still possible to say that BOTH Einstein and Picasso were influenced by some common elements that had appeared in western culture at that time. This, in itself, would be unremarkable; Both Einstein and Picasso lived in the same continent at the same time, it would be very surprising if they did NOT have some common influences. But professor Miller tries to stretch this comparison to the breaking point and well beyond. The result is a book in which excellent summaries of their early life and careers are marred by clichéd and overblown psychobabble and cultural theorizing.
The book is still interesting because it deals in detail with the lives of two such gifted and unique individuals. But the comparisons are frequently forced, and the author seems to have failed to take the advice of either of the masters. Picasso was dismissive of most attempts to retrospectively slot his art into some art historian's version of "influences and phases" and he would certainly have resisted any attempt to "explain" his genius in this manner. Einstein, too, was willing to leave the mystery of creativity unsolved. Mr. Miller would have done well to present us with two separate books about Einstein and Picasso, or one bigger book on the cultural ferment of the early nineteen hundreds. This attempt to find "the secret of creativity" fails to rise above the level of the self-help manuals that crowd our bookshops. Einstein loved music, so music is listed as one of the routes to creative "non-verbal" thought. But the fact that Picasso was never interested in music does not constitute a counter-example for Mr. Miller. Meanwhile, Picasso smoked hashish and took opium with great regularity through this period, but while the slightest hint that he might have heard of geometry is inflated beyond belief, this significant aspect of his life gets only two lines in the book.
Last, but not the least, while science and art are both human products, their natures are very different. Much of Modern art has moved beyond mere representation and become more like music (an esthetic experience which may or may not represent a particular "story") but science is nothing if it's not a coherent story. Einstein rebuilt the foundations of modern science by systematically and LOGICALLY questioning the basic assumptions of Newtonian physics and the discoveries of electro-magnetism. This achievement may have involved intuition and unconscious influences, but it would be useless if scientists could not eventually understand and agree on its meaning. Modern art may well deal with matters even more important than the physical structure of the universe (love, sex, death, loss, meaning, values, rebellion, rage...) but it would not be art if all artists were to agree on its significance and meaning.

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Summary: Going over Boundaries between Disciplines
Review: What factors can be motivations of a genius's reformative work? Is it possible that the same notions affect geniuses in science and art? What is the daily life of geniuses? What processes are going on when a genius does a monumental work? We often have such questions as above. Arthur I. Miller, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, wrote a wonderful book to answer all of those questions and to tell us more about creative activity by the example of the two giants of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso.

This dual biography centers on the special relativity theory discovered by Einstein in 1905 and the Cubism painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" produced by Picasso in 1907. In the first chapter, the author mentions that Poincare's book "La Science et l'hypothese" gave a spur to both of the two geniuses and led them to explore new notions of space and time. Tracing their respective lives in later chapters, the author clarifies how both men sought representations of nature that transcend those of classical thought and reach beyond appearances. The reader would be convinced of the fact that the effect of Poincare's book is not a superficial similarity between the works of Einstein and Picasso but a common denominator deeply rooted in the culture and science of the early twentieth century.

In the last chapter the author insists that at the creative moment boundaries between disciplines dissolve. Namely, aesthetics becomes paramount also in science; on the other hand, artists solve problems just like scientists. So, if you are a scientist, you would find direct interest in the chapters on Einstein and also find it profitable to read the chapters on Picasso; and if you are an artist, the reverse would be true. Laypersons would also get a lot of stimuli to a productive life from this book.