"Picasso at the Lapin Agile", Steve Martin: "...Comes From the Future..." "Wrong!"

This is one of my favorite books in my library. I bought it while I was living in San Luis Obispo and saw some show late at night about Steve Martin, the comedian, movie star, and writer. Martin got a degree in Philosophy, which made his transition to night-club hopping comedian pretty easy.

They mentioned this book during the program--I don't remember what it was--and I went out and bought it pretty much the next day.

Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a collection of plays that Martin wrote, and my favorite--and the reason I bought the book--is the eponymous "Picasso at the Lapin Agile".

The Lapin Agile is the name of a bar in Paris that Pablo Picasso would frequent. During the actual time that Pablo was living in Paris another titan of the twentieth century had also visited the City of Light: Albert Einstein.

Both men would have been young and both not yet presented the world with their momentous ideas: for Picasso it was Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and for Einstein it was his theory of Special Relativity esposed in his Annus Miribilus papers (1905). The play is an imagined meeting of the two most important men of the twentieth century in their respective fields.

The two guys meet at the Lapin Agile, shoot the breeze as only two geniuses can, and we even see Einstein correcting Picasso on his theory of what I call the Ganzebilde. The men don't know each other before, and a future meeting is unlikely, but their time spent together has left an indelible mark on one another.

Steve Martin, a noted art collector, let his feelings about which was more important be known with the title of the play, and eventually, the book. Eh, maybe not..."Picasso at the Lapin Agile" sounds better than "Einstein at the Lapin Agile", and in the play the bar is Pablo's hangout, and Albert does get the last word in their competing theories of the nature of the cosmos...

In any case, the copy of the book has a picture from one of the first productions of the play, and the great casting allows us to imagine how the scene could have looked:

Now, this meeting may never have happened. In fact, it likely didn't. But, in the realm of crazy science guy hanging out with crazy thinky art guy, I have the great pleasure of announcing that such a meeting did happen, and it blossomed into friendship.

Here, the science guy was more of a mad scientist and has actually been labeled the Father of the Twentieth Century, and the thinky art guy was actually a writer, one of  America's most beloved:

Oh yeah, man, that's Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain. That'd be a hell of an evening.