Review Article

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

by Arthur I. Miller
Basic Books, NY, 2001
267pp., illus. b/w
ISBN 0-465-01859-9

Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain

by Semir Zeki
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999
218 pp., illus. col.
ISBN 0-19-850519-1

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
Polar (The Posthuman Laboratory for Arts Research)

pepperell@ntlworld.com

If we are to find a reliable way of integrating knowledge between science and art then the intellectual traffic must pass in more than one direction. There seems to be no shortage of scientists willing to make low-level interventions in art theory using insights from their own fields to generate apparently novel interpretations of cultural artefacts. Along with the two authors reviewed here we could also mention the surgeon Leonard Shlain, the physicist Erich Harth, and the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey along with the neurologist V. S. Ramachandran whose ideas on the neurology of art appreciation form the basis of this year’s Reith lectures for the BBC available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/reith2003_lecture3.shtml)

One is hard pressed, however, to name any prominent artists who have attempted equally serious interventions in, say, advanced neuroscience, laparoscopic surgery, particle physics or evolutionary psychology. Were they to try it is likely their efforts would receive – let's put it diplomatically – a 'guarded' reception. Indeed, my experience when commenting on matters scientific, or even philosophical, to members of those communities is that an artist's views can often be entertained with polite interest and then bracketed. The fact that specialists from a wide spectrum of disciplines feel qualified to critically engage with art may be a positive testament to its pervasive cultural resonance. But there must be other reasons why so many scientists feel compelled to devote so much intellectual energy to revealing what art seems to secrete: – are such projects the indulgent by-products of an already well-established reputation, are they symptomatic of an inadequacy in orthodox art history, or do they actually represent an emerging kind of human knowledge that harmonises hitherto inconsonant disciplines?

In Einstein Picasso Arthur I. Miller, the eminent historian of science, stokes the on-going debate about the connections between avant-garde Parisian art and theoretical physics in the period up to the First World War. As we approach the centenary of the birth of both cubism and relativity it seems the possibility of their having had some contemporary symbiosis continues to fascinate. Miller produces a "parallel biography" of two Titanic figures in order to demonstrate how in their early careers "they were both working on the same problem" (sleeve note and p. 174); the problem being the limitations of classical representations of space and time. It's worth saying that this is a hotly contested claim with heavyweight art historians, including Linda Dalrymple Henderson and John Richardson, categorically rejecting any cross-pollenation between Einstein's theories and the development of cubism. (The other significant volume on the subject, Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light by Leonard Shlain (1993), is oddly not mentioned by Miller.)

There are undoubtedly some striking parallels between the early circumstances of both Picasso and Einstein: both experienced periods of poverty and rejection, both relied on a close circle of friends for intellectual nourishment, and both produced – almost simultaneously – seminal work that entirely reshaped their respective disciplines. Moreover, they each drew on the work of polymath Henri Poincaré; Einstein quite directly and Picasso through the conduit of his friend Maurice Princet. But it is the philosophical proximity of cubism and relativity that seems, in retrospect, to need accounting for, and it is the nature of this proximity – in what ways were cubism and relativity similar? – that to my mind leaves the greatest scope for misinterpretation. Miller is amongst those who see both projects as essentially reductionist, which is to say that each seeks to expose some underlying, geometric sub-structure of reality that would remain otherwise concealed.

He is not alone in taking this line, and it chimes with views about cubism that were expressed at the time it came to critical notice. So for example, we read that: "For their [Picasso and Braque's] new art they conceived a new aesthetic: reduction to geometric forms" (p. 239) and "Cubist work starts with a subject that is then represented in ways that attempt to illuminate its deeper structure" (p. 157). Or more strangely: " [Cubism] sought to avoid ambiguity while representing objects in a manner closer to their deep structure." (p. 136). This latter statement is strange because cubism was a form of art that elevated and celebrated ambiguity in a way no previous art form ever had. Miller's failure to recognise this characteristic of cubism – its preoccupation with contradiction, uncertainty and indeterminism – amounts to an elided reading of the paintings.

Despite the quantity of scholarship and the enthusiasm of the author for his subjects, Einstein Picasso tends to undermine its own authority. Some of the misdemeanours are minor but embarrassing, such as when Henri Matisse is referred to as being "twelve years younger than Picasso" (p. 24) when the reverse was true. Others are less forgivable, such as the tendency to turn well-founded speculation into hard fact. The contents of imagined late-night, drink-fuelled conversations amongst the 'bande à Picasso' and their impact on the development of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon are an example. Despite these errors, the biographical images Miller paints are sharp and vivid, the historical threads he draws together are fascinating, the section on the role of photography in Picasso's pictorial development is compelling, and much of the discourse on early relativity theory is illuminating although not entirely original.

But the central promise of the book – to rectify the neglect of the "scientific, mathematical and technological roots of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (p. 85) and establish its commonality with Einstein's relativity project – remains unfulfilled. This is not because there are no points of commonality between cubism and relativity, but because of the inappropriate scientific motives that Miller imputes to Picasso's paintings. What makes cubist art so great is precisely that, with its ambiguity and uncertainty, its anti-geometricism (at the very least in its rejection of mathematical perspective), its occult leanings, and its fragmentation of the coherent viewing subject it resists the conventions of science. Cubism displays qualities that, in fact, eschew empiricism at the same time as suggesting the very indeterminacy Einstein was so famously unable to bring himself to accept when he rejected the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum field theory with his famous remark about God and dice. If anything, cubism was less to parallel relativity theory than to foreshadow the stark incomprehensibility of quantum theory, with its stress on the probabilistic nature of an unknowable physical world.

Semir Zeki offers an alternative analysis of cubism, amongst other forms of art, in his sumptuously produced book, Inner Vision. As a neurologist with a specialist interest in the study of the visual brain, Zeki attempts to apply the latest neurobiological research to account for artistic production and reception. One of his main theses is that we don't see with our eyes but with our brain, which is to say that the process of seeing is less the passive reception of a coherent image than: "active process in which the brain, in its quest for knowledge about the world, discards, selects and, by comparing the selected information to its stored record, generates the visual image in the brain, a process remarkably similar to what an artist does." (p. 21). By this selection and construction the brain and the artist are both searching for "constants" or "essentials", which are the qualities of the visual world that are accumulated through experience rather than fleeting impressions. Hence he states: "I shall therefore define art as being a search for constancies, which is also one of the most fundamental functions of the brain" (p. 12).

In a limited way it’s a reasonable hypothesis, yet one that leads Zeki almost immediately into some very deep and dangerous waters. I only have space to mention his analysis of cubism, which exposes the limitations not only of his argument but also his grasp of the historical data, including the pictures themselves. He sets up and then knocks down a straw man, beginning by claiming cubism was an attempt to: "mimic what the brain does" (p. 54) insofar as it synthesised multiple views, and hence accumulated knowledge. He then concludes that in trying to do this it was: "a failure – an heroic failure perhaps, but a failure nevertheless." (p.54). The reason for this failure, according to Zeki, was that during the so-called Analytic phase the subjects of the paintings become so unrecognisable that it is only the painting's titles that allow us to identify a Man With Violin or a Woman With Mustard Pot. Speaking of the difficulty of deciphering the representational content of Picasso's works, he goes on: "It was probably hard for Picasso himself, which is presumably one reason he used objective and recognisable titles to describe his paintings." (p. 55). In stating all this Zeki compounds three errors: first, the idea that Picasso and Braque's cubism is primarily about the depiction of simultaneous viewpoints is a naïve simplification repeated by commentators since the work was first exhibited. Second, cubist paintings are never abstract or unrecognisable; they abound with visual clues that, when given appropriate attention, reveal the paintings' subject. Third, Picasso certainly didn't title his cubist works; those titles that are now commonly used were given by subsequent critics and cataloguers.

As with Einstein Picasso, this is by no means a worthless book. As one would expect from Zeki's academic profile, the passages on neurology are expertly written and absorbing, offering all sorts of avenues for further speculation and investigation. To find such a comprehensive and accessible compendium of data on current work on the neurology of vision is invaluable, not least for the references. But like Miller's book, it is the application of scientific (or at least certain kinds of scientific) methodologies to the analysis of artistic practice that is both the central purpose of Inner Vision and, at the same time its greatest weakness. In both instances it is not only that one can accuse the authors of misreading the works (we can all be guilty of that), but more importantly each adopts, in a different way, a reductionist stance that is incompatible with artistic appreciation. In Miller's case, it is the reduction of cubism to geometry, in Zeki's case it is the reduction of art to a formalistic response by specialised modules in the brain, thereby taking little account of the social, cultural or historical significance of the work, let alone the emotional response of the body (Arthur Koestler is one of the only critics I have come across who has acknowledged the importance of the corporeal dimension of aesthetic appreciation).

Of course, one welcomes Miller's works on cubism, as well as Zeki's putative neuro-esthetics as a sign of increased integration between scientific and artist knowledge. But our desire to see such integration should not blind us to the constraints of each discipline's methodology. If science seeks certainty and predictability whilst art (in certain significant cases) seeks the opposite, there is a danger of eternal antagonism. Unless science can find a way of embracing ambiguity it will never be able to fully account for the emotive power of art. On the other hand, I wouldn't want an artist with a tangential interest in experimental surgery, however enthusiastic, to operate on me.