StageView: Picasso at the Lapin Agile

A Momentous Historic Moment

Steve Martin set this play at the dawn of a new century, just years before monumental breakthroughs in science and art that would come to define modern world.   

In 1904, the year of Martin’s fictitious meeting at the real-life café Le Lapine Agile, Albert Einstein, unable to secure an academic appointment, labored as an obscure clerk in the Bern, Switzerland patent office. He lived in a cramped apartment in the town center and struggled to support his wife, Mileva, and their infant son, Hans Albert.  Within a year, he would overturn precepts of theoretical physics that had held since Isaac Newton and the Scientific by publishing three papers in a single volume of the prestigious journal, Annalen der Physik. One paper, entitled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” contained the Special Theory of Relativity.    

That same year found the young artist Pablo Picasso living in an atelier in Montmartre, having returned to Paris from Barcelona for the fourth time since 1900, with the hope of selling some paintings.  He was through with the somber work of his Blue Period and had not yet entered the Harlequin inspired work of the Rose Period.  Within a year, he would abandon that work and again cast about for a way forward for himself and his art.  He found inspiration in the paintings of Paul Cezanne and in the “primitive” sculpture of Africa and Iberia. This he coupled with concepts borrowed from non-Euclidean geometry, the mathematical rage of the day, and entered a period of experimentation that culminated in the 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon.  Considered the seminal work of Cubism, Les Demoiselles introduced the art world to the idea of mobile perspective. In so doing, it overthrew the Renaissance idea of fixed or single perspective.  Painting would never be the same.

In the early twentieth century to be an artist, a scientist, a poet, a thinker, a mathematician, or even just an average reader of magazines or daily newspapers was to be awash in wave after wave of new ideas.  It was a time, as Arthur I. Miller, author of Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, observes, “when everything seemed possible and realizable everywhere.”  Imaginations thrived on the advances of new technology in automobiles, airplanes and wireless telegraphy. The discovery of X-rays seemed to dissolve boundaries between the visible and the invisible.  Led by such luminaries as Henri Bergson and Henri Poincaré, philosophy and science reveled in the implications of realms beyond three dimensions.  In fiction, writers such as H.G. Wells speculated on time travel, while the art world absorbed the influence of spatial ambiguity as pioneered by Cezanne. Seemingly everywhere, across multiple disciplines, the perception of space and time was changing radically. 

In this confluence of complex theories touching on concepts of simultaneity, motion, and Newtonian mechanics, Picasso and Einstein commenced their separate investigations, employing exceptional creativity bolstered by extraordinary flashes of insight.  The artist turned his studio into a laboratory for the study of geometric forms, while the scientist employed his famous thought experiments to reach beyond the limitations of laboratory data.  Miller writes: “Picasso and Einstein believed that art and science are means for exploring worlds beyond perceptions, beyond appearances.” He adds, “Ultimately they were working on the same problem: How to represent space and time at just the moment in history when it became apparent that these entities are not what we intuitively perceive them to be.”  

-Joseph Whelan, Publications Director at Syracuse Stage

“Two creations . . . Albert Einstein’s special relativity theory and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon are the works that brought science and art into the twentieth century.” Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc.