StageView: Picasso at the Lapin Agile

Reception

Genius is not now—nor has ever been—a guarantee of acceptance.  Matisse was outraged by Les Desmoiselles de Avignon.  Derain reportedly said: “Painting of this sort was an impasse at the end of which lay only suicide; that one fine morning we would find Picasso hanged behind his large canvas.”  The noted art critic Félix Fénéon laughed.  For a year and half Picasso labored in virtual solitude on a painting no one understood and nearly everyone ridiculed.  Completed in 1907, Les Demoiselles would not be publicly exhibited until 1916 and would not be recognized as a revolutionary breakthrough until the 1920s, years after Picasso and Georges Braque had produced their master works of cubism.

Similarly, the publication of The Special Theory of Relativity would not bring Einstein immediate and widespread recognition.  He remained at the patent office until 1909 and received his initial academic appointment at the University of Zurich for work unrelated to relativity.  Among the elites of the world of theoretical physic, Einstein’s theories garnered much interest, not all of it positive.  Many misunderstood Special Relativity and linked it to an earlier theory by H.A. Lorentz. This dual theory, as it became known, was soon overturned by experiments (later proved incorrect) conducted by the renowned scientist Walter Kaufman.  Max Planck of the University of Berlin understood that Einstein was addressing issues beyond Lorentz’s theory, but even he never fully accepted Special Relativity.  Part of the problem for these scientists was the theoretical leap Einstein made.  Not all of Einstein’s theories could be proven in the physical world at the time.  He became instantly world famous in 1919, however, when the English astronomer Arthur Eddington used observations made during a solar eclipse to prove one of Einstein’s most spectacular predictions: starlight would swerve measurably as it passed through the gravity of the sun.  Suddenly, as Miller notes, “the stars were not where they were suppose to be,” but it didn’t matter because Einstein understood it.

-Joseph Whelan, Publications Director of Syracuse Stage

“Einstein’s temporal simultaneity matches Picasso’s spatial one.  Both amounted to representing nature from several viewpoints at once.  How you measure or view a scene, that is what it is.” Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc.

"To rank with Newton or Einstein, you have to reinvent the way we see the world.” NOVA: Einstein’s Big Idea