Einstein, Picasso, and Cubism: ‘Seeing’ the Fourth Dimension

The review by Stephen G. Brush of Arthur I. Miller’s book Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc (Physics Today, December 2001, page 49 ), prompts me to add some comments.

Pablo Picasso did not invent cubism. Paul Cezanne was painting cubist paintings, in all but name, by the mid-1880s. Objects were analyzed and reduced to basic geometric forms, often to aggregations of flat planes, and were seen from more than one angle of perspective in many of Cezanne’s works. Picasso himself did not turn to cubism before seeing the great Cezanne show of 1906, shortly after Cezanne’s death, and often spoke of his reverence for the older artist.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted in 1907, as is stated in the article, but was not publicly exhibited until years later. If not the first cubist picture, it was certainly the most shocking one at the time. Even Picasso was a little afraid of it; for 15 years after he’d painted it, he showed it only to friends.

While the review states that both Picasso and Albert Einstein held that “thinking, not seeing, leads to the truth,” Einstein reported differently: While still a teenager, he imagined himself riding on a beam of light and wondering about the consequences of it. This implies that the vision, albeit an internal one, preceded the thought. Einstein often emphasized that the idea preceded the thought. Thus his perception of nature, or his “seeing” of nature in a deep sense, was the necessary forerunner of all the thinking that followed.

And Cezanne’s finely wrought cubism came from seeing, which he always stressed as paramount when painting from nature. He suggested that truly seeing could give birth to a closer re-creation of what the eye and mind actually perceive than could a classical Renaissance perspective.