Duchamp Versus Einstein by Christopher Hinz

Author:Christopher Hinz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857668356
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2019-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

LONG ISLAND, 1939

Albert’s second season in Cutchogue, Long Island, should have been as enjoyable as his first. But recent events had accelerated the worrisome situation in Germany. That madman Hitler’s lust to conquer and destroy seemed to possess no upper limit. Last November’s anti-Jewish pogrom had been awful enough. This year, his renouncing of non-aggression pacts with Poland and Britain suggested worse.

It was a warm evening, this first Tuesday in August, although not unbearably so.

Albert had opened all the screened windows in the tidy cottage he rented on Old Cove Road, which was only a few hundred feet from Little Peconic Bay. Those waters constituted the most beautiful sailing ground he’d ever experienced.

Wednesday’s forecast indicated a continuation of today’s weather: blue skies and steady winds, perfect conditions for venturing out onto the bay from Nassau Point in Tineff, his little sailboat.

He was alone at the cottage, the way he liked it. His secretary Helen Dukas, also his housekeeper since the death of his second wife, Elsa, in 1936, had remained behind in Princeton. But solitude and sailing plans were likely to be disrupted by tomorrow’s visitors.

Albert had been tempted to reject the visit, order that it be postponed until he returned to New Jersey at the end of the season. But fellow physicist Niels Bohr had urged him not to dawdle and to meet with the two men as soon as possible. The situation in Europe not only grew more perilous by the day as indicated by the radio and newspaper reports, there were darker rumblings on the horizon, Nazi threats as yet unrevealed to the public at large. Niels felt they could not risk delaying.

Needing a distraction from the troubles and tensions that tomorrow’s visitors likely would bring, Albert settled into his comfortable leather chair beside an open window and delved into a book. He’d borrowed it from a neighbor, an aspiring sculptor. The book was a far cry from his usual fare, which tended to be steeped in the rigors of science and higher mathematics.

It was a brief history of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, a touring show that began its successful run at a Manhattan armory before proceeding to venues in Chicago and Boston. The show had served to introduce experimental European styles such as Cubism and Futurism to American audiences. A number of artists had achieved fame through the exhibition with their unusual works, most prominently Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp.

The book included a number of photographic plates of the artists’ projects. Albert had never been enamored with the modern art scene. Matisse’s portraits, Blue Nude and Madras Rouge, left him cold. Yet he couldn’t help but admit that Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 possessed a quality that defied simple analysis and subsequent dismissal. The painting’s sense of abstract motion – delineated by cones and cylinders in shades of gold, ochre and brown – seemed to render it simultaneously irrational and logical. The Frenchman’s effort had captured, in artistic form, the paradoxes that might or might not be inherent to the pesky and oft indigestible impacts of quantum theory.

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