A Question about Einstein and Missing (?) Modernism

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 799 

How much was Einstein affected by the many pieces of what was the greatest revolutionary period in history?  The period from, say the pre-Impressionists (1860 or so) to the period just after Cubism (again, say 1920), saw epochal changes across the sciences, medicine, the arts, literature….virtually everything. I cannot think of any period in intellectual history that approaches this 60-year period. Actually, the gargantuan changes can be shaved down to the period of Einstein’s living memory beginning with the stunning discovery of Roentgen’s x-rays in 1895 to the invention of non-representational painting in 1911¹.  Breathtaking, really. 

In all of this, I wonder how Einstein saw the vast changes that were not in the fields of physics or mathematics?  Poincare, Boltzmann, Planck were analyzed and understood and appreciated and etc.  But what about Strindberg, and Schoenberg, and Seurat, and Leger, and Joyce, and Malevich, and Duchamp, and Kandinsky, and Klee?  Einstein certainly loved music and had a deep understanding of it, but it was with Mozart and Bach that he found beauty.  The music of the sphere, the primum mobile, the hand of the creator, were found in these two men.  Beethoven was too melodramatic; Wagner (in 1939) was disgusting.  Others were just too simple, too light. 

I don’t know what he felt about Schoenberg, or Joyce, or Klee.  Perhaps they were too messy, too unstructured, too removed from the fundamentals of nature that he felt Mozart found and displayed.  I just don’t know. As the architect of one of the most fundamental changes in the history of science, I wonder if (and why) he stood so seemingly unaffected by so many of these other enormous changes.

Notes:

1.  There are a number of books that address these revolutionary changes, but only one, I think, that looks at the great broad swath of revolutionary activity across many fields:  William Everdell's The First Moderns (U Chic). A lovely book.