Author Leonard Shlain Takes Science to Art

Trudging through one of New York City’s modern art museums a while back, Leonard Shlain’s 12-year-old daughter repeatedly tugged at her father’s sleeve. Just what makes these objects great art, she wanted to know.

Shlain was stumped. About the same time, however, the San Francisco surgeon had been reading about modern physics and found himself similarly befuddled. Suddenly he saw a connection.

“I realized that for the first time in human history, art had become impenetrable at the exact same time that science” had become incomprehensible to most, said Shlain, who spoke at the Laguna Art Museum on Thursday about his new book, “Art and Physics,” which explores a link between the two fields.

A specialist in video-assisted laparoscopic surgery, Shlain is admittedly self-taught in art and physics, but his book, published in October, is already in its fourth printing and has won praise from critics. A Times reviewer recently called it “brilliant, accessible and visionary.” His lecture, part of a book promotion tour, was laden with such terms as quantum jumping, vectors and the Doppler effect . But his easygoing delivery and colloquial analogies seemed to make it more of an “aha” experience than a head-scratcher for an appreciative audience of about 40, most of whom knew their art better than their science.

Shlain’s thesis is that the works of visual art’s titans from the Golden Age of Greece to the present have presaged major scientific discoveries; that Michelangelo anticipated Copernicus, and that Leonardo Da Vinci beat Isaac Newton to the punch, for instance.

“The truly visionary artist is the first person in the culture to glimpse the world in a new way,” he said, focusing his talk largely on Albert Einstein, whose complex theories of relativity involving space, time and light were foreshadowed by several modern artists, according to Shlain.

In the early 20th Century, “while Einstein was doodling on a napkin (developing his theories), Picasso teamed up with Braque and brought forth an entirely new way to see space and called it Cubism.”

Einstein said that if the observer is moving close to the speed of light, all sides of any object may be seen simultaneously, Shlain said. The Cubists had the same idea, he said, citing Picasso’s iconic “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a depiction of several women that features the artist’s trademark technique of painting a single face as if seen in profile and from the front, all at once.

Cubism allowed artists to “paint the world according to their own inner vision,” not according to any immutable standard of reality, he said.

Artists paid little heed to scientific inventions, but Cubism and Einstein’s theory were so similar that it was as if Einstein called Picasso and Braque and said, “ ‘Say, I’ve got this really difficult idea. Do you guys have a diagram to show what I’m trying to get at here? ‘ Shlain said.

Einstein also said that, again, if he were traveling close to the speed of light, any object he whizzed by would be seen simultaneously in the past, present and future, Shlain said. That phenomenon was earlier embodied by Marcel Duchamp’s highly abstract “Nude Descending a Staircase 2,” which looks somewhat like a series of still photographs mapping out a figure’s fall, from beginning to end.

“You could see where she was, where she is and where she’s going to be,” he said.

Several artists anticipated Einstein’s ideas about light, Shlain said. Einstein declared that the color of any object is not constant, but can change, relative to the speed at which the observer is moving.

Explaining that color is simply light at various wavelengths, Shlain said artists had the same basic idea (only earlier), using color wildly and unconventionally “as an emotional language that could speak to us and change our mood.” The Fauvists said that “trees can be purple and sky red,” and Paul Gauguin was “the first artist to declare unilaterally that grass is red,” he said.

Shlain makes no pretense of being an expert in art or science, and said criticism of his work from experts in either area wouldn’t come as a surprise. Still, with rare exception, scientists have told him that his discussions of art, couched in a scientific framework, have helped them enjoy and understand it as never before, and artists say his interpretations have helped them grasp scientific principles with new clarity. That leads him to believe that he may be creating a bridge of sorts.

“Now, how can that be bad?” he asked.