The Essence of Seeing: Surrealism, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics
How an artistic vocabulary of images helps us “see” beyond representation
Salvador Dalí may not have intended for “Agnostic Symbol” to evoke gravitational lensing, but it’s the only thing I can think about when I look at his elongated, bending spoon.
Einstein’s revelation in general relativity was that spacetime itself is a flexible medium that can be warped by gravitational objects, and that any object — even light, which has no mass — must follow its curves. Light traveling from behind a massive object bends and sharpens, as if passing through a gravitational “lens,” in the curved spacetime — the four-dimensional continuum of space fused with time — around that object. Dalí’s spoon looks to me like a ray of light frozen in its path through the spacetime deformed by a black hole, a galaxy, or even a smaller object like our sun, such as was observed by Sir Arthur Eddington in the 1919 eclipse that secured Einstein’s world fame. (If you look closely, you’ll see a timepiece in the spoon.)
Eddington’s “picture proof” of relativity came in the form of photographs of stars near the sun where the stars’ positions shift slightly. There is a striking difference between the visual evidence provided by astronomy and the mental imagery of a light ray— its course or path— that interprets the phenomenon behind the shift of these dots.
“Agnostic Symbol” corresponds with what I imagine when I think about the warping of spacetime, although I can’t find conclusive evidence that this was on Dalí’s mind when he painted it. Whether or not it was intentional, art of this kind can provide a vocabulary of images to enhance our conceptual frameworks.
We do know that, after relativity, Dalí called for “a new geometry of poetic thought,” and his melting clocks beginning with his famous 1931 The Persistence of Memory suggest time dilation as well as the warping of spacetime described in general relativity. Dalí understood that neither absolute space nor absolute time existed, and that the union of space and time had physical significance. Citing a plate of cheese as his inspiration, he described his melting watches as “the extravagant and solitary Camembert of time and space.”[1]
Dalí was an iconic Surrealist, and Surrealism was, after all, the art movement that reckoned with impossibility, celebrated the juxtaposition of distinct realities, dissolved boundaries between inner and outer worlds, and championed imagination over realism. Unfortunately, despite its emphasis on overthrowing old paradigms, Surrealism was also a movement that reinforced patriarchal social structures and objectified women, buttressed by the Freudian pseudoscience that lay at its foundation. In attaching themselves to physics, I argue, they bet right on the “outer world” and found beguiling new territories, but in embracing a philosophy of childhood fear of castration (for males) and penis envy (for females), they limited their “inner worlds” to tired ideas about male agency and female passivity.
The Surrealists engaged seriously with psychoanalysis and dreams, with mysticism and the occult, and with political movements, but I intend to focus on their relationship with physics. And I am interested less in the minutiae of history — whose books were found in whose libraries — than in the suggestions and undercurrents of physics embodied in the art. It is inevitable that some artists understood the science better than others; what is (perhaps) surprising is the extent to which so many artists were directly incorporating the ideas of physics onto the page or canvas. Later, with the atomic bomb and the advent of the Cold War, things changed, and André Breton, the movement’s founder, went so far as to disavow science altogether.
But in the beginning (the Surrealist manifesto was published in 1924), Surrealism was interested in unearthing underworlds, and early 20th century physics enriched that program.
While some might resist an account that argues that the ‘weirdness’ of physics was the draw, I submit that such ‘weirdness,’ coupled with a robust philosophy of science, was precisely the draw.
With the unification of electricity and magnetism (the discovery of invisible fields), with radioactivity (the presence of new glowing energies), with relativity (time dilation, length contraction, the warping of spacetime), and with quantum mechanics (with its radical implications about causality and the role of the observer in measurement), physics was unseating the orderly clockwork universe in surprising and counterintuitive ways.
If in Enlightenment science we had been looking at our reflections on the surfaces of the world, relativity and quantum mechanics darkened the waters, thickening (as Dalí would describe space after relativity) the objects of investigation so that they would elude our efforts to take their measure.
As Gavin Parkinson demonstrates in Surrealism, Art, and Modern Science, the Surrealists were aware of the revolutions in electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics that characterized the early 20th century, and they felt mobilized by the epistemological crises those revolutions precipitated. How could they not? Physics seemed to be dismantling everything we thought we knew about the fundamental nature of reality, and the philosophical and popular writings about physics at the time begged artists to engage in a similar project.
Gaston Bachelard’s The New Scientific Spirit (1934) was a pivotal work disseminating the ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics to a wider literary audience. (Bachelard, known chiefly in the U.S. as the author of The Poetics of Space and The Psychoanalysis of Fire, began his career as a physical chemist and epistemologist of science.[2]) André Breton embraced and borrowed heavily from Bachelard’s works on the implications of the new physics. Bachelard’s emphasis on the role that imagination — albeit a disciplined imagination, working in conjunction with mathematics — plays in the study of scientific phenomena would have been particularly exciting to these artists eager to overthrow old paradigms. Science had finally transcended the epoch of merely reporting what the senses perceived. In his “Surrealism and Painting,” Breton quoted Bachelard:
“What is the nature of belief in reality, what is reality as a concept, what is the primordial metaphysical function of the real? Essentially it is the conviction […] that one will discover more in the reality concealed in the entity than in the immediate data surrounding it.”
In other words, there is more to reality than meets the eye.
André Breton’s mentor had been the brilliantly wild poet, Paul Valéry. In his eulogy for Valéry, physicist Louis de Broglie praised his love of the “sudden discovery of vast intellectual horizons” of modern physics that offered “strange new perspectives.”
A crucial player in quantum mechanics, de Broglie uncovered a key insight, namely the duality of subatomic particles: Particles such as electrons behave as waves and, not only that, but all particles and objects are associated with matter waves.
Valéry’s intellectual versatility was evident; de Broglie was fascinated by his literary use of scientific terminology. Indeed, Valéry read Faraday, Maxwell, and Kelvin, visited labs and cultivated friendships with Marie Curie, Paul Langevin, Neils Bohr, Jean Perrin, and even had what was described as a “warm relationship” with Einstein.
The Surrealists and their sympathizers read, both primary physics texts and those written for lay audiences — often written by the physicists themselves in journals for polymaths. And the Surrealists left evidence that they were directly engaging with scientific ideas. Much of this is established in Parkinson’s book. Breton, of course, read Bachelard’s The New Scientific Spirit, but so did Dalí, Wolfgang Paalen, René Crevel, Raymond Queneau, Calas, Carrouges, Marcel Duchamp, Tzara, and many others. The international journal Scientia had contributions from physics giants such as Planck, de Broglie, Pauli, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, as well as book reviews of popular accounts and analyses of the implications of modern physics.
Louis de Broglie alone contributed no fewer than nine non-mathematical papers to Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, which the Surrealists were reading. Breton owned the French translation of Einstein’s Special and General Relativity. Paalen read de Broglie’s Matter and Light and responded with Between Matter and Light. Paalen’s short-lived journal Dyn urged its readers “to understand that imagination creates reality as much as it is created by reality.” Some of the artists who rendered inscapes read J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment in Time, which explored the “implications for psychology of Einstein’s spacetime.” The influential writer Armand Petitjean’s Imagination et Réalisation displayed familiarity with the physics of Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, and others. The language of early 20th century physics was sexy: Eddington described measuring the deflection of light in gravitational lensing as “weighing light.” Neils Bohr was a veritable fount of delicious quotations that both welcomed paradox and challenged the norms of conventional science:
“The opposite of a great truth is another truth,”
No, no, you are not thinking, you are just being logical.”
Bohr’s thinking was a good fit for the Surrealists, who celebrated radical breaks with the past.
Science and culture have always been in dialogue. When Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell revealed that electricity and magnetism are one and the same force and depicted electromagnetic fields, their language and imagery of attraction and repulsion infused André Breton’s writing and influenced visual artists.
One of those visual artists was Roberto Antonio Sebastián Matta Echaurren. Matta was part of the Surrealist movement from 1937 until his expulsion in 1948. According to Robert Motherwell, his intense project of using physics was in part to challenge the Surrealists after his removal, to dissent from those “who weren’t zeroed into contemporary reality” (presumably those who weren’t seriously studying physics). Duchamp said that “Matta followed the physicist in the search for new space” — a space that was non-Euclidean, and unpopulated with fixed objects.
Depicting these spaces and fields became a serious project for artists like Matta, Oscar Dominguez, Paalen, and Onslow-Ford. It was, as we have seen, a warped, uncertain reality.
The spacetime of Einstein’s general relativity recruited a version of non-Euclidean geometry, and this in turn admitted a whole family of mathematical realms to the catalogue of the possible.
Realms that seemed to misbehave and defy common sense. Bachelard warned that common sense leads to “crippling impediments of mind.” Naturally, such geometry sparked excitement about space and form. According to the scholar Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “[t]he tradition of a spatial ‘fourth dimension’ possessed mystical and even irrational associations that supported the Surrealist outlook.”[3] It should be noted that at times (especially in discussions about relativity and Cubism), there is a conflation of ideas: Some understood the fourth dimension as time, whereas others conceived it as a kind of hyperspace. Henderson studies this at length, but here again I intend to consider both ideas as imaginative invitations for figurative art. Rendering these scientific and mathematical ideas in art can only ever be pure suggestion. This is not to say that these artists weren’t serious about their work, for example, Matta went so far as to claim not to be an artist:
“I’m somebody who tries to construct images that will help us realize the essence of the verb ‘to see.’
As early as 1919, Max Ernst’s interest in formal geometry was manifest, but it was especially stoked by a 1934 display of mathematical models at the Institute Poincaré, also seen by Man Ray, whose photographs of the teaching tools transformed them into wonderfully odd sculptures. Some of these curved surfaces allow us to explore non-Euclidean geometry, in the same way that a triangle drawn on a sphere has angles that add up to more than 180 degrees.
Ernst’s technique in “Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly” involved dripping paint from a swinging can, resulting in curves loosely resembling those traced by a Foucault pendulum bob.[4] Breton felt that we owed “a pictorial language” to Ernst “in accordance with the new conception of things advanced by Einstein.”
After quantum mechanics, Bachelard wrote that chemical substance itself had been reduced to l’ombre d’un nombre (the shadow of a number) — a substance being only the likelihood of a chemical reaction. This is French poetry — we have since been able to use field-emission microscopy to map the physical contours of the atom (it still has something like a shape, and one might argue thus, actuality). But Bachelard’s compelling language evinced the way the science of the unseen was unsettling our investigations into the physical world.
Remedios Varo’s “Fenómeno” (“Phenomenon”) comes to my mind, where shadow and substance have swapped places (indeed, another of her paintings is called “Substance Theft”), and the bricks coming up from the street hint at the dissolution of the solid world. Again, nothing about this is literal, but Varo did employ science imagery in much of her Surrealist work. Another painting of Varo’s, “The Phenomenon of Weightlessness,” was evocative enough to be chosen for the cover of one of the first textbooks about general relativity, The Riddle of Gravitation, by Peter Bergmann.[5]
As the mathematics of physics grew increasingly rarefied and remote, the gap between physicists and non-physicists was widening. But physicists also had open arguments, born of the need to reconcile dueling formulations of mathematics and perplexing experimental results, about whether and how to visualize this new world. In quantum mechanics, Heisenberg, Dirac, and Pauli believed we should follow the math and eschewed visualization, whereas de Broglie and Schrödinger wanted to be able to picture these forbidden realms. The argument that we dare not try to visualize was for some a summons. As our mental images become less accessible and more impossible, Surrealist visions begin to make a certain kind of (desperate) sense.
Quantum mechanics brought the revelation that the act of taking a measurement technically alters the system. (In technical terms, we say that the measurement “collapses” the wave function, forcing a subatomic object to take on definite values. This has the shocking implication that, until a measurement is taken, the electron exists in a “superposition” of states.) Strictly speaking, there is now a relationship between observer and observed. Quantum loop gravity physicist Carlo Rovelli explains this interpretation (which Einstein could never really reconcile with) [6]:
“Heisenberg imagined that electrons do not always exist. They only exist when someone or something watches them, or better, when they are interacting with something else. They materialize in a place, with a calculable probability, when colliding with something else. The ‘quantum leaps’ from one orbit to another are the only means they have of being ‘real’: an electron is a set of jumps from one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is not in any precise place. It is not in a ‘place’ at all.”
Another way of understanding this so-called “Copenhagen Interpretation” is described in George Musser’s book, Spooky Action at a Distance, where it is as if we have a remote control that, when you press it, “instantly condenses” the particle “from a vague haze of potentiality into a real pulse of light.”[7] Musser’s project is to explore an alternative interpretation, an even stranger one called nonlocality, which I leave to the reader to pursue.
While some outside of physics have drawn reckless conclusions from this insight, physicist Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat recognized a key parallel. Her comment, “In physics as in painting, Surrealism denies the possibility of a description which does not carry explicitly the stamp of the observer,” is comprehensible in a world after quantum mechanics.
Between that, wave-particle ‘duality,’ and a misunderstanding of Einstein’s meaning of ‘relativity,’ many sloppy poeticizations of the insights of physics creep in, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun.
I situate myself somewhere between Parkinson’s exceedingly careful historical analysis (minus the gross omission of women, covered presently) and the far less careful work of Leonard Shlain’s popular book, Art & Physics: Parallel Visions of Time and Light, which indulges in grand irresponsible claims about artists’ minds tapping into some shared well of consciousness, intuiting what scientists discovered. Shlain sees the same gravitational lens that I do in “Agonostic Symbol,” but he downplays how much Dalí’ read and thought about relativity, either because Shlain knew nothing about it, or to support his case for artistic intuition.
Not long ago, I agreed to lead a discussion on Shlain’s Art & Physics, and I was struck by the flagrant privileging of mostly European white males in his history of both artists and physicists. While I found much rigor in Parkinson’s book that was absent in Shlain’s on the transmission of scientific ideas, I was disappointed to see the same glaring omission of contributions from women.
Why is this? I studied physics, philosophy of science, and poetry; I know how women have systematically been written out of history. I was saddened to see that Parkinson’s book also ignored both women artists and scientists, apart from mentions — only mentions— of physicists Marie Curie and Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat or artist Alice Rahon. As I began to investigate the history of women in Surrealism, I found that many of the women painters and photographers of the movement became relegated over time to the role of “muse of ____” or “lover of ____.” And it was notoriously difficult for women to officially join the movement. As we have seen, Freud’s ideas, which played a key role in the development of Surrealism, did not help. Speaking as someone trained in the hard sciences, I contend that he was not a real scientist: psychoanalytic “theory” is not falsifiable — not a proper theory. Freud’s method of arriving at his ideas couldn’t be further from the methods of physics; in physics, even the wildest, most counterintuitive conclusions are arrived at by the strictest investigations into nature. The emphasis on sex and dreams in Surrealism, in Freud’s paradigm, encouraged the objectification of women.[8] Izabella Scott writes [9]:
“While Dalí used the female figure in optical puzzles, Magritte painted pornified faces with breasts for eyes, and Ernst simply decapitated them. ‘The Noble Mannequin is so perfect,’ wrote the Surrealist René Crevel in 1934, ‘she does not always bother to take her head, arms, and legs with her.’ In other words, she was already an exquisite corpse.”
Exquisite corpse was a common exercise for Surreal artists and poets, where in the most common version, a sheet of paper is folded and added to by multiple artists, each seeing only what the last has drawn or written.
In Surrealism and Misogyny, Rudolph E. Kuenzli argues that to the Surrealists, women were not seen as subjects, but mere projections of their dreams and desires. Kuenzli points out that the “Surrealists saw the actual demands of French women for social emancipation in 1924 as merely bourgeois.” This, perhaps, is not shocking when we consider that the same Marie Curie who had already been awarded one of her two Nobel Prizes still had to fight for her position at the Sorbonne and was rejected from the French Academy of Sciences.
In 2015, an exhibit on Science and Surrealism at Gallery Wendy Norris in San Francisco (featuring a curatorial conversation with Gavin Parkinson) apparently tried to remedy this omission of women with the inclusion of Remedios Varo. However, Varo was conspicuously absent from Parkinson’s original (2008) book. To his credit, Parkinson does reference scholarship by women on the intersection of science and art.
However, what is written out of history often vanishes for good, and while I haven’t found much written evidence of women Surrealists directly engaging with modern physics, I am sure that it happened; the ideas were irresistible. Meret Oppenheim’s 1964 self-portrait celebrated X-ray imagery with a negative of her skull. Dora Maar’s “The Years Lie in Wait for You,” with its title and spider-web imagery, could speak to what Einstein called the “stubborn illusion” of time — all events, taken from the right perspective, have already happened and are currently happening.
There is much for the viewer to take away from Ángeles Santos Torroella’s “Un mundo,” where female characters surround a globe that has changed from its original form into a warped cube, suggesting non-Euclidean angles and lines, while large-headed women are lighting the stars with fire taken from the sun.
I did not intend when I began writing this essay to explore the subtle questions of scientific instrumentation and interpretation, but as I reflect on Dali’s spoon, my mental light ray, and the photos from the eclipse, I find those philosophical issues resurfacing. It is hard for us now to appreciate how some natural philosophers first reacted to microscopes and telescopes, because we moderns tend to see them as direct extensions of our sight. But that was not always the case. Margaret Cavendish worried about microscopes, about flaws and deformities in the glass and the effects of changes in the light, as “art doth more easily alter than inform.” Even Hooke, in his ecstatic Micrographia, addressed the “difficulty” of discovering “[an object’s] true shape.” There were those who refused to look through a telescope, arguing that the instrument introduced artifacts and illusions — like mountains on the moon or satellites around Jupiter. How much further we have come, with our particle accelerators, x-ray diffractometers, and underground dark matter detectors, each requiring more levels of inference. We sometimes forget that even looking at the horizon requires interpretation. Before Leonardo da Vinci, who saw — and understood that they were seeing — all the myriad dark shades of green in a distant treeline? The human mind has always played an outsized role in seeing. We need art — as well as science — to see. And we need art that is playful, in the sense of serious experimentation and in the sense of creating pleasure, to help us see well.
[1] Dalí’s The Conquest of the Irrational, 1935.
[2] For a great overview of Bachelard’s philosophical career spanning both science and poetry, see Roch C. Smith’s Gaston Bachelard: Philosopher of Science and Imagination [Revised edition, SUNY. 2016]. Bachelard told his students that he had the feet of a philosopher of science but the wings of a poet.
[3] Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. [Revised edition, MIT. 2013]
[4] Ernst’s method is described in “Surrealism and Painting,” 1942.
[5] Natalie Angier, “Scientific Epiphanies Celebrated on Canvas,” The New York Times, April 11, 2000.
[6] Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Riverhead Books. 2016.
[7] George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2015.
[8] See “Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Depiction of Women in Surrealist Photography” by Katherine Bottinelli and Susan Laxton, 2018.
[9] Izabella Scott “The Pivotal Role that Women Have Played in Surrealism” 2017.
— Nightingale render by Georges Hattab
