Art Quotations by Albert Einstein

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

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Revealing Picasso: X-Radiography

X-rays can reveal much about an artist's working process and can frequently show compositional changes. X-rays are located beyond UV in the electromagnetic spectrum. Like UV they are invisible but have even shorter wavelengths and greater energy than visible light. X-rays penetrate through paint layers and supports to varying degrees depending on the atomic weight of the material being x-rayed. Materials of low atomic weight allow x-rays to pass through easily and therefore appear dark on x-ray film, and those of high atomic weight block x-rays and appear white. For example, lead white paint is highly opaque to x-rays whereas carbon-based paints, including some blacks, are more transparent. The thickness of the material also determines the degree of opacity.

X -ray setup

In the study of The Old Guitarist, examinations with visible and ultraviolet radiation suggested the existence of two earlier compositions underneath the image of the old guitarist. X-radiographs revealed two faces peering out from behind the musician:

(Contour 1) an older woman with her head bent forward, and

(Contour 2) a young mother with a nursing child kneeling at her side.

One or both figures appeared to be sitting with their left arms outstretched. In addition, the head of an animal was visible on the right. In this example the x-rays penetrated the upper paint layers which are thinly painted and less x-ray opaque, revealing x-ray absorbent layers beneath.

The Old Guitarist x-ray still image.

Since an x-ray penetrates down to the support layer of a painting, it can be used to examine the structure of the panel on which The Old Guitarist is painted. Detail 1 shows the wood grain of the panel. Detail 2 shows white lines that are actually cuts made into the wooden support before it was painted. When Picasso applied the ground laye,r the greater thickness of the ground material at the cuts shows up white on the x-ray film. It has been hypothesized that the wooden support for The Old Guitarist was originally a large breadboard, which would explain the multiple cuts and the joins at either end.

Detail 1: wood grain, center

Detail 2: cuts in panel, left center

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