Near the beginning of Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer examines a Picasso painting. 'Femme assise aux bras croisés,' painted in 1937.
painted in 1937, depicts a woman with teal skin as she sits in a chair with her arms crossed.blue eyes nearly pierce the screen as we observe him staring at it—but what, exactly, is he thinking?
In the film, Oppenheimer—known as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”—encounters the painting at an inflection point in his studies. One of his idols, the Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr , has encouraged him to leave Cambridge, where he’s been struggling with his lab work, to focus on his real passion: theoretical physics. Newly energized, Oppenheimer begins throwing crystal glasses onto the floor of his apartment to watch them break.
Decades before World War II and the atomic bomb, Picasso and French painter Georges Braque first introduced the world to cubism. The style defied the accepted norms of perspective, depicting its subjects from multiple angles and with no single source of light. In the context of, the Picasso Oppenheimer observes accentuates the physicist’s journey away from convention and into the unknown.
Perhaps more importantly, Picasso’s perspective-shattering style mirrors Oppenheimer’s contention that the world as we see it is a mirage. One night at a party, he explains to his future wife that according to quantum mechanics, the world we observe “is mostly empty space—groupings of tiny energy waves bound together… [by] forces of attraction strong enough to convince us that matter is solid.
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