had a small studio and also lived with his wife and child.
One afternoon I plucked up my courage, located the artist’s street address, entered an inner courtyard and knocked on the door of a little room that was behind a toy shop facing rue Madame. I was feeling apprehensive as I waited for someone to answer my knock. Would today be a new beginning in my life, or was I to be disappointed again?
A striking-looking man with black hair and lively brown eyes opened the door. He was friendly to me, an unexpected visitor, and introduced me to his wife, an Irish woman whom he had married while studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Poliakoff spoke fluent English as well as French, so we conversed in English. After I explained to him how I had admired his paintings in Copenhagen and had come to Paris recently to pursue an art career, he invited me to spend time with him in his studio, where I became his student.
Serge Poliakoff was very kind to me, accepting me as his only student even though I had no money to pay him, and spending a year teaching me the techniques of abstract painting. He taught me, in his unique way, how to make oil paints from the original powder sold at a special shop in Paris. This technique of producing oil paint was one of the secrets of the vibrant colours in his paintings. He also told me to visit the Louvre once a week in order to appreciate and learn from the works of the great masters. At this time, Poliakoff was living in quite poor circumstances. As painting was not providing a living, he also played the guitar in cafés at night, specializing in Russian folk music.
My small rented room in Porte d’Orléans was in a turn-of-the-century greystone apartment building in rue des Plantes. I would paint my abstract canvases by propping them up against an ancient wooden wardrobe opposite the large oak bed, making sure that I didn’t drip too much paint on the Turkish rug, which would upset my landlady, who took a motherly interest in my welfare. My paintings were in the style of abstract expressionism developed by the Parisian school in the 1940s and ’50s. I used bold colours and developed planes of colour with expressive brushstrokes.
One day, Poliakoff told me to bring five of my paintings to his studio. We would each hang five of our paintings in a spring art show—the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles—an annual event held at the Musée d’Art Moderne on avenue du Président Wilson. Our paintings hung among those of artists such as Victor Vasarely, Pierre Soulages, Jean Dewasne, Hans Hartung, Jean Deyrolle and other abstract expressionists. Poliakoff himself became famous as an abstract painter before he died in 1966, lifting himself and his family far out of the impoverished circumstances I had observed when working with him in rue Madame. Today his paintings are auctioned at high prices and exhibited in major art museums worldwide.
During my year in Paris, my father came to visit for several days. He took the train from Copenhagen and stayed in a small hotel near my rented room. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was living vicariously through me. My father was still painting at that time and was eager to meet Serge Poliakoff. Perhaps he envied me being able to enter the world of art in Paris as a young man, for his chances of doing so in Rome had been thwarted by his father.
Although in reviews of the spring Salon show in Le Monde and Figaro I was flatteringly described as a young, upcoming art talent, after a year in Paris I ran into severe financial difficulties, as my meagre savings were running out. During the immediate postwar years, employment opportunities were scarce in Paris, particularly for foreigners. To help my financial position, I sought out American tourists, offering to be their guide. After showing them around places of interest, I would meet them at their hotel or in a café, a painting or two in hand, and attempt to make a sale. Inevitably these guided tours were financially unsuccessful, although I generally managed to obtain a free lunch or dinner.
Reluctantly, after my year as an aspiring painter, I returned home to Copenhagen. I was discouraged by my failure to begin a successful art career in Paris, and I knew that I would not have such a year of opportunity again. I did manage, however, to mount a show of Serge Poliakoff ’s work and mine at Illums Bolighus gallery that year in Copenhagen. Poliakoff did not come in person, but sent ten canvases to me by train. We did not sell a single painting, and I felt even more disappointed about my lack of progress in the art world. Copenhagen, after all, was not a centre for art like Paris, and I knew that I would be inviting continuous financial difficulties if I devoted myself to painting.
Again I found myself living with my parents, my father still not fully recovered from tuberculosis and my mother working long hours in downtown restaurants. Just as before my year in Paris, I again worked every day at boring or distasteful odd jobs to bring in money to help support us.
And again, I was forced to ponder what to do with my life.
Not long after returning from Paris, out of curiosity I picked up two popular-science books, The Nature of the Physical World and Spacetime and Gravitation, both written by Sir Arthur Eddington. They were about Einstein’s theory of relativity, cosmology and the evolution of stars. These books greatly affected me. It’s as if they turned a switch on in my brain that I had no idea was even there. Eddington, a fine writer, was able to create a sense of almost spiritual wonder in me at the mysteries of the universe and an emotional desire to know the truth of how the universe began. His books triggered an astonishing turning point in my life.
After reading the books, I began having strange visions of the structure of the universe and the fabric of spacetime as revealed by Albert Einstein. In these daydreams, I tried to comprehend how the universe was structured. These daydreams were intuitive forms rising from my subconscious rather than conscious attempts to understand the universe. The visions seemed to indicate some primal urge developing in me to connect with the stars and galaxies of the universe.
Initially my visions were colourless, and then they turned into vast, colourful canvases. I began to realize that there was an unconscious merging of myvisual experiences when painting and the visualization of the heavens all around us. When I painted, I didn’t contemplate the “meaning” of art or feel any phenomenological need to “prove” my paintings. But as I continued to read and daydream, I began to realize that physicists who attempt to understand nature initially have a visual experience which then has to be transformed into a theory by means of mathematical formulations. However, in contrast to creating a painting, this initial imaginative process in physics has to be verified eventually by experiment. Later in life I expressed this idea as: Physics is imagination in a straitjacket.
I decided, against the incredible odds, that I would try to pursue science seriously, particularly physics and mathematics. Obviously, I could not contemplate becoming an experimentalist, for this required special academic training and access to laboratories and experimental apparatus. However, I could pursue theoretical physics with just my brain, pencil and paper, and access to a good library. I tried to push aside my knowledge gaps and failures as a student. At none of the many schools I attended had I thrived intellectually. One principal had counselled my parents to put me in trade school. I tried to push aside the memory of the mathematics teacher whose judgment had killed my chances for admission to university. Since that normal route for acquiring knowledge was closed to me, I would have to pursue this new dream on my own. I was at a stage in my life when one’s ardent desires and passions can overcome what to others would be impossible odds. I had a self-confidence then that is perhaps only possible when one is nineteen.
In counterpoint to the memories of myfailures, another strange memory rose in my consciousness. I recalled that when I was six or seven, my father took me to see a psychiatrist in London because I insisted on reading the time in counter-clockwise fashion, and I also reversed whole sentences when learning to read. The psychiatrist peered at me with curiosity, and asked me questions in staccato sentences. When he was finished with me, I sat in the waiting room and overheard him telling my father that his boy was a “genius.” At the time, I turned the word “genius”
