Nouvelles—an annual event held at the Musée d’Art Moderne on avenue du Président Wilson. Our paintings hung among those of artists such as Victor Vasarely, Pierre Soulages, Jean Dewasne, Hans Hartung, Jean Deyrolle and other abstract expressionists. Poliakoff himself became famous as an abstract painter before he died in 1966, lifting himself and his family far out of the impoverished circumstances I had observed when working with him in rue Madame. Today his paintings are auctioned at high prices and exhibited in major art museums worldwide.
During my year in Paris, my father came to visit for several days. He took the train from Copenhagen and stayed in a small hotel near my rented room. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was living vicariously through me. My father was still painting at that time and was eager to meet Serge Poliakoff. Perhaps he envied me being able to enter the world of art in Paris as a young man, for his chances of doing so in Rome had been thwarted by his father.
Although in reviews of the spring Salon show in Le Monde and Figaro I was flatteringly described as a young, upcoming art talent, after a year in Paris I ran into severe financial difficulties, as my meagre savings were running out. During the immediate postwar years, employment opportunities were scarce in Paris, particularly for foreigners. To help my financial position, I sought out American tourists, offering to be their guide. After showing them around places of interest, I would meet them at their hotel or in a café, a painting or two in hand, and attempt to make a sale. Inevitably these guided tours were financially unsuccessful, although I generally managed to obtain a free lunch or dinner.
Reluctantly, after my year as an aspiring painter, I returned home to Copenhagen. I was discouraged by my failure to begin a successful art career in Paris, and I knew that I would not have such a year of opportunity again. I did manage, however, to mount a show of Serge Poliakoff ’s work and mine at Illums Bolighus gallery that year in Copenhagen. Poliakoff did not come in person, but sent ten canvases to me by train. We did not sell a single painting, and I felt even more disappointed about my lack of progress in the art world. Copenhagen, after all, was not a centre for art like Paris, and I knew that I would be inviting continuous financial difficulties if I devoted myself to painting.
Again I found myself living with my parents, my father still not fully recovered from tuberculosis and my mother working long hours in downtown restaurants. Just as before my year in Paris, I again worked every day at boring or distasteful odd jobs to bring in money to help support us.
And again, I was forced to ponder what to do with my life.
Not long after returning from Paris, out of curiosity I picked up two popular-science books, The Nature of the Physical World and Spacetime and Gravitation, both written by Sir Arthur Eddington. They were about Einstein’s theory of relativity, cosmology and the evolution of stars. These books greatly affected me. It’s as if they turned a switch on in my brain that I had no idea was even there. Eddington, a fine writer, was able to create a sense of almost spiritual wonder in me at the mysteries of the universe and an emotional desire to know the truth of how the universe began. His books triggered an astonishing turning point in my life.
After reading the books, I began having strange visions of the structure of the universe and the fabric of spacetime as revealed by Albert Einstein. In these daydreams, I tried to comprehend how the universe was structured. These daydreams were intuitive forms rising from my subconscious rather than conscious attempts to understand the universe. The visions seemed to indicate some primal urge developing in me to connect with the stars and galaxies of the universe.
Initially my visions were colourless, and then they turned into vast, colourful canvases. I began to realize that there was an unconscious merging of myvisual experiences when painting and the visualization of the heavens all around us. When I painted, I didn’t contemplate the “meaning” of art or feel any phenomenological need to “prove” my paintings. But as I continued to read and daydream, I began to realize that physicists who attempt to understand nature initially have a visual experience which then has to be transformed into a theory by means of mathematical formulations. However, in contrast to creating a painting, this initial imaginative process in physics has to be verified eventually by experiment. Later in life I expressed this idea as: Physics is imagination in a straitjacket.
I decided, against the incredible odds, that I would try to pursue science seriously, particularly physics and mathematics. Obviously, I could not contemplate becoming an experimentalist, for this required special academic training and access to laboratories and experimental apparatus. However, I could pursue theoretical physics with just my brain, pencil and paper, and access to a good library. I tried to push aside my knowledge gaps and failures as a student. At none of the many schools I attended had I thrived intellectually. One principal had counselled my parents to put me in trade school. I tried to push aside the memory of the mathematics teacher whose judgment had killed my chances for admission to university. Since that normal route for acquiring knowledge was closed to me, I would have to pursue this new dream on my own. I was at a stage in my life when one’s ardent desires and passions can overcome what to others would be impossible odds. I had a self-confidence then that is perhaps only possible when one is nineteen.
In counterpoint to the memories of myfailures, another strange memory rose in my consciousness. I recalled that when I was six or seven, my father took me to see a psychiatrist in London because I insisted on reading the time in counter-clockwise fashion, and I also reversed whole sentences when learning to read. The psychiatrist peered at me with curiosity, and asked me questions in staccato sentences. When he was finished with me, I sat in the waiting room and overheard him telling my father that his boy was a “genius.” At the time, I turned the word “genius” over and over in my mind, and decided that it could not mean anything favourable for my future.
But now I thought about it again. I discovered during that year in Copenhagen, and contrary to all my experiences in school, that I had a surprising, indeed remarkable, ability to learn mathematics and physics rapidly. This was partly due to my photographic memory, which I also first discovered during that year. Now I wondered whether my talent for learning science and mathematics rapidly had been there all along, untapped by any of myteachers, or whether it might actually have developed suddenly, perhaps even as a consequence of the post-traumatic stress disorder I had suffered after the war. Despite all my previous failures, I was now highly motivated to excel in mathematics and physics; perhaps it was my strong motivation itself that released my aptitude for science and math, which had been dormant all those years. And my motivation sprang from my intense reaction to the Eddington books. Could there be a more compelling testimonial for good popular-science writing than this?
It was fortunate for me that the University of Copenhagen library allowed people to borrow science books and periodicals without their having to be enrolled as students. In this way I was able to read physics and mathematics materials and move quickly towards an understanding of modern physics and cosmology. I taught myself stealthily, sneaking time to go to the library while on my messenger jobs, and poring over my books and papers every night. My parents didn’t know what to make of this latest development. Our financial situation was worsening, and they feared that this new turn in my life would distract me from contributing to the support of the family. Yet I did manage to continue working at my menial jobs, while at the same time completing the equivalent of four years of undergraduate training in physics and mathematics within the year. I learned the basics of calculus in less than two weeks and became proficient in solving differential equations.
Because I had progressed rapidly in my private studies, I began feeling that surely, with my newly discovered aptitude, I could do something more interesting than the odd jobs that provided me with a meagre wage. I decided to push things further. I made an appointment with the director of the astronomical observatory in Copenhagen. I explained to him that I was interested in becoming a physicist, and was studying physics, astronomy and cosmology by myself. He sent me to the Copenhagen University Geophysics Institute, where the kindly director took an interest in me, and gave me a job solving least