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It was the age of the Cold War, and all of the party attendees were planning to attend a peace congress in Sheffield the next day, which was going ahead despite government opposition to its communist connections. At one point, Bernal turned to one of his guests in the crowded flat and asked him if he'd like to scribble something on the living room wall. This wasn't as reckless an idea as it might sound, as the guest in question was Pablo Picasso.
JD Bernal is remembered mostly as a pioneering X-ray crystallographer and a scientist whose brilliance inspired many in the early days of molecular biology, such as Rosalind Franklin. But he was also passionately interested in culture and politics, says his biographer Andrew Brown. "And he was deeply interested in the visual arts."
Picasso shared Bernal's political sympathies and was fascinated by his scientific work, as Brown describes in his book, JD Bernal: The Sage of Science. During a tour of the crystallography labs earlier in the evening, the contour maps of electron densities revealed by the X-ray diffraction caught Picasso's eye. "These maps actually reminded him of his own drawings," Brown says.
In response to his host's invitation, Picasso worked free of the throng and climbed up on a chair to begin drawing on the space above the bookshelves, first a male head with a laurel wreath around it, and then a beautiful female figure to keep it company. "He stepped down from the chair and someone at the party yelled 'what's it got to do with peace?', so he added a pair of angel's wings," says Brown.
The mural stayed where it was on Bernal's wall until the building was scheduled for demolition, at which point it was carefully salvaged. In 1969, Bernal donated the mural to London's Institute for Contemporary Art.
Next week, the Bernal Picasso will get a new public home, after the Wellcome Trust bought it from the ICA. The image will occupy the foyer in the Wellcome Collection, a new exhibition venue in central London.
Ken Arnold, head of the Trust's public programs, says the mural was an ideal match for the new venue, which aims to explore the connections between medicine, life and art. "For us it feels like a perfect emblem of our interests," he says. "Here's an object that captures that sense in which great science naturally gravitates to great art. It's a lovely record of an extraordinary moment when these
great worlds came together."
"Both in his science and his eye for art, [Bernal] had an amazing appreciation for symmetry and the underlying mathematics," Brown says. "And he always resented the separation of the arts and sciences."
Stephen Pincock
mail@the-scientist.com
Image: Bernal's Picasso, from the Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library.
Links within this article
E. Garfield, "How an understanding of science history is useful, enriching and rewarding," The Scientist, December 13, 1993.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/16325/
L. Lane, "Crystal illumination," The Scientist, January 19, 2004.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/14365
B. Maher, "Rosalind Franklin Papers (a lesson in lab communication)," The Scientist, February 6, 2007.
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/49082/
JD Bernal: The Sage of Science, Chemical Heritage Foundation review
http://www.chemheritage.org/pubs/reviews/review_brown.html
Picasso's only mural produced in England acquired by the Wellcome Trust
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX036823.html
S. Pincock, "No art please, we're scientists," The Scientist, April 11, 2005.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/15389
N. Russell, "Steinbeck's scientific muse," The Scientist, August 25, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/24382
