The Joan Miro show at Tate Modern finished week. The most memorable and stunning piece is the vast 1968 triptych: Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse
Adrian Searle at the Guardian liked it too: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/11/joan-miro-tate-modern
It needs to be seen to be appreciated. It is a world line, a strange trajectory, a life lived, a concise and beautiful statement.
Acrylic on canvas
267,8 x 352 cm
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
From this image and others in this series, I anticipated that Piet Mondrian was contemplating a deeper understanding of what makes up the world........ I discovered his words on the subject today.
'For there are 'made' laws, 'discovered' laws, but also laws - a truth for all time. These are more or less hidden in the reality which surround us and do not change. Not only science but art also, shows us that reality, at first incomprehensible, gradually reveals itself by the mutual relations that are inherent in things'.
'The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms.
Nothing is “mere”.
I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them.
But do I see less or more?
The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this little carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light.
A vast pattern – of which I am part – perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there.
Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together.
What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why?
It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.
For far more marvellous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!
Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?
What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia be silent?'
RP Feynman, “Lectures on Physics”
'It has been one of the most destructive modern predjudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests.
.........
Science and the arts today are not as discordant as many people think. The difficulties which we all have as intelligent amateurs in following modern literature and music and painting are not unimportant. They are one sign of a lack of a broad and general language in our culture. The difficulties we have in understanding the basic ideas of modern science are signs of the same lack. Science and the arts shared the same language in the Restoration. They no longer seem to do so today. And it is the business of each of us to try to remake that one universal language which alone can unite art and science, and layman and scientist, in common understanding.'
From: 'The Common Sense of Science'
I was alone with a chair on a plain
Which lost itself in an empty horizon.
The plain was flawlessly paved.
Nothing, absolutely nothing but the chair and I
were there.
The sky was forever blue,
No sun gave life to it.
An inscrutable, insensible light
illuminated the infinite plain.
To me this eternal day seemed to be projected --
artificially-- from a different sphere.
I was never sleepy nor hungry nor thirsty,
never hot nor cold.
Time was only an abstruse ghost
since nothing happened or changed.
In me Time still lived a little
This, mainly, thanks to the chair.
Because of my occupation with it
I did not completely
lose my sense of the past.
Now and then I'd hitch myself, as if I were a horse, to the chair
and trot around with it,
sometimes in circles,
and sometimes straight ahead.
I assume that I succeeded.
Whether I really succeeded I do not know
Since there was nothing in space
By which I could have checked my movements.
As I sat on the chair I pondered sadly, but not desperately,
Why the core of the world exuded such black light.
Jean Hans Arp was an artist - painter, sculptor and poet. Looking at his work over the years, I had a hunch that he thought about physics, though couldn't find any formal mention of it. Then, I found this poem where he considers time when nothing happens and 'movement' through space when there is no fixed reference point.