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

BRUSH REPLIES: These two letters illustrate how, in the century since Einstein and Picasso made their startling discoveries, physics and art have grown further apart. Richard Tourin gives a critique of four-dimensional representations of the world, while Charles Zigmund wants to award Cezanne the credit for inventing cubism.

Arthur Miller has something important to say to both correspondents: Einstein and Picasso lived in a culture that was fascinated by the concept of a fourth dimension and how it might offer a clue to the nature of a world that is not completely or directly visible to us. Miller offers documented personal connections, not just statistical correlations; and he shows in detail how the two geniuses developed their ideas, following similar though separate paths. If you want to argue about whether Picasso could “see a fourth dimension” as he worked on Demoiselles or whether “truly seeing” a beam of light requires some kind of thinking (not just collecting the raw visual sensations available to everyone), you will find Miller’s book useful.