from “divine mathematics.” Igor Stravinsky’s approach to music was extremely painstaking and structured, too. He portrayed the musician as “a craftsman whose materials of pitch and rhythm in themselves harbor no more expression than the carpenter’s beam or the jeweler’s stone.”
Painters can be equally disciplined. Thus this remark by the Post-Impressionist Seurat: “To see poetry in what I have done … No, I applied my method and that’s all there is to it.” As for Matisse’s preoccupations with his huge compositions, they seem to be matched by the mental gymnastics of scientists deeply absorbed in shaping their hypotheses. Guided by formal rigor, he stated: “A moment comes when each part has found its legitimate relationship, and from there on, it would be impossible to add a single line to the image without having to start the painting all over again.” Braque even said: “I love the rule which corrects emotion.”
Although science aspires to objectivity, scientists are not always more objective than artists. Galileo deliberately ignored Kepler’s work, and Pasteur did not immediately adhere to Darwin’s. The need to test established knowledge, the thrill of exploring a new domain, the hope of discovering a new order, all compel scientists to accept the same basic challenge: to reveal what no one has expressed before, and thus leave their mark.
Most creators are totally committed to their tasks. Whatever the nature of their skills, those who succeed in imposing an innovative vision of the world often enjoy particularly productive careers.
Polyvalence
Despite their commitment to their chosen field, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer were also gifted scientists. Conversely, scientists like Nikolaus Copernicus and Louis Pasteur were talented artists. Such relations are hardly limited to the visual arts. The number of mathematician-musicians (for example Euler, Schweitzer and Einstein) is even more striking.
Numerous artists have been interested in science, and scientists in art, but most of them focus strongly on only one domain, while their interest in the other remains secondary. Time constraints and technical barriers explain such a choice. Moreover, one cannot underestimate the distinction between interest and real talent (interest alone by no means leads to significant performance).
Can one easily switch from art to science and vice versa? For an artist to become a scientist is placing the stakes very high, but the reverse is no easier. What accounts for creativity and who is destined to excel in its pursuit? Such questions have long puzzled great minds. According to the Dutch chemist, Jacob van t’Hoff, the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: “The most innovative scientists are almost always artists, musicians or poets.” Creativity might indeed depend on a capacity to integrate traditionally incompatible forms of experience. But this is not always the case: Darwin and Cézanne, to cite just two examples, were not particularly polyvalent.
The Spiral Forms in Nature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1831
The Romantic writer Goethe was also a biologist. He introduced the notion of “morphology,” which would be fundamental to the development of the theory of evolution of species. This drawing suggests the mutation of a leaf into a flower.
Klassik Stiftung Weimar; Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv
Still the question remains: what favors, in some of the most inventive minds, an aptitude and appetite for both science and art? Certain forms of art may exhibit affinities to scientific disciplines—and hence mental processes may link the architect to the astronomer, the stage director to the physicist, the psychologist to the painter. Perhaps a chemist thinks like a decorator, and a mathematician like a musician.
Inspiration and visualization
Centuries ago, creators were expected to follow in the footsteps of their predecessors, building along a prescribed tradition. Nowadays, with an increasingly demanding public, innovation has become the driving force in art. Yet novelty, too, whether in art or science, requires a base. (For example, examination of Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon reveals neo-classical sources [Delacroix and Ingres] as well as less familiar ones for African and Polynesian statuary.) The stylistic sources behind a work of art are often heterogeneous and more difficult to trace than are the origins of scientific theory; moreover, the artist is not required to explain them.
Since creation can never be fundamentally new, there might be no such thing as a muse or a mystery of creativity, but various interpretations co-exist. The “unconscious” eventually replaced the role of the gods as the creative source. In the nineteenth century, Henri Poincaré, a mathematician and philosopher, advanced a theory according to which the creative process passes through various stages such as preparation, incubation, illumination, verification. In this way, numerous thought combinations would be tested by the “unconscious,” and only those meeting some sense of harmony would be selected.
Encounters with an idea or an image are essential in art and science. In order to create, both need to be visualized either mentally or on paper, or through measurement. Quantification and visualization may be said to represent two sides of the same coin.
The physicist Wolfgang Pauli studied the role of symbolism, using collective models that were applied to scientific concepts. Many artists and inventors linked their discoveries to epiphanic moments when their minds were “floating”—think of “eureka,” Archimedes’ cry in his bath—and they often describe these moments in poetic imagery. Because such moments are repeatedly mentioned, they deserve our attention.
What should one think of Newton’s sudden revelation while watching an apple falling from a tree? Gutenberg reportedly said that his idea for the first printing press struck him like a ray of light while observing the operation of a wine press at a festival. Lumière said that he invented the moving picture system while watching his mother use a sewing machine. Einstein declared that latent mental images stimulated his imagination for years before he was able to draw any conclusions from them: “In my case (psychical entities) are of a visual and sometimes of a muscular type. Conventional words and other signs have to be searched for laboriously only in a second phase.”
Some of the world’s greatest scientists—Aristotle, Alhazen, Bacon, Descartes, Einstein—were fascinated by optics and visualization. So, too, some of the greatest painters—Velázquez, Vermeer and Turner—methodically analyzed light, color and image formation. “What I did not draw, I did not see,” said Goethe.
In the past, researchers were puzzled by the mysterious functioning of the eye. Today, they try to understand how the brain decodes the images it receives from the eye.
Studies of twentieth-century geniuses—Picasso, Einstein, Freud and Stravinsky—conclude that no universal characteristic has yet been found to link their phenomenal creativity, other than the spirit of independence. What makes a genius remains a riddle worthy of the Sphinx.
Research
Some artists do not sketch: they let the painting reveal itself as they go along. Others proceed through trial and error, as do scientists. In this manner, Cézanne explored the effect of fracturing effects of light on his Mont Saint-Victoire, returning to the motif over and over again. Matisse’s letters about his own privileged theme, La Danse, reveal a similar concern: to solve a problem. Altering the placement of a single mark or slightly modifying a color in a painting can easily affect or even destroy the overall design.
When analyzing Picasso’s preliminary drawings for major paintings or collages, the steps he took to construct a picture can be retraced. Calder, another creator who enjoyed a long career, allows us to trace his progressive approach in sculpture. Newton and Einstein reworked their
