Why the association of these two names... a name, Arthur Miller *, Professor of history of sciences to the university London College.

According to him, "Picasso and Einstein raised the same question about the nature of space and time, a central question in the scientific debate of the time. And, each one in their field brought a similar answer to it".

May 1905: with the federal office of the patents of the town of Bern, in Switzerland, a 26 years old German physicist, completes his article on the electrodynamics of the bodies moving.

June 1907: in his studio of Montmartre, in Paris, a 26 years old and young Spanish artist, put the last touch in a painting entitled "The Demoiselles of Avignon".

At two years of interval, the first, Albert Einstein, founded the restricted theory of relativity which revolutionizes the physics, and the second, Pablo Picasso, signed the birth certificate of the cubism, which will upset the painting.

No relationship exists, a priori, between these two events. Except that the traditional world has just collapsed!

To link "On the electrodynamics the bodies" to "The Demoiselles of Avignon" is indeed tempted. Because if the principal lesson of the article of Einstein, in rupture with the principles of Galileo or Newton, is that there is no more "ether", this substance bathing all the Universe so far used by the physicists as the privileged referential to define the movement of any particles, the principal lesson of the painting of Picasso, in rupture with the principles of Raphaël or Vermeer, is that referential, dimensional effects, privileged angle do not exist anymore: they are simultaneously painted from every angle.

For both of them, the representation of the things in the space and the time goes through the giving up of the absolute referential.

However the historians of art generally consider that the origin of the cubism is found in the African art and the work of Cézanne.

Is this quasi simultaneous emergence of Art and Modern Science sheer coincidence?

Arthur Miller has a very interesting approach of it in his book.
* Einstein, Pisasso: Space, Time and the beauty that cause Havoc Arthur MILLER (BASIC Books, 2001).