Picasso Painting Heads to a Theater Near You, Making a Star Appearance in ‘Oppenheimer’

In Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic Oppenheimer, there are just as many atomic bomb tests as there are Picasso paintings: one each. But both figure prominently at different moments in this film, which is nested with allusions to elements from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life that aren’t represented, including a surprising connection to Picasso’s work that dates back to the physicist’s childhood.

Early on in the film, Oppenheimer, as played by Cillian Murphy, rises as a physicist in training. He meets the legendary scientist Niels Bohr, who devised a legendary model for atoms that is still used today, and is turned on to the magic of the discipline. “Can you hear the music?” Bohr asks Oppenheimer at one point, referring to the imagined sounds of invisible particles going about their business.

Oppenheimer can, and we do, too. Against Ludwig Göransson’s swooning score, the camera journeys down from the clouds and into an unnamed museum, where Oppenheimer admires Woman Sitting with Crossed Arms (1937), a painting now held by the Musée Picasso in Paris. It’s one of many images Picasso painted of Marie-Thérèse Walter, the woman who Picasso began seeing romantically when he was 45 and she was 17 in 1927.

Picasso’s image of Walter is notably abstracted, with one eye having slid downward, one breast warping the shape of a hand underneath, and one shoulder missing entirely. Many have discussed portraits like this one as emblematic of Picasso’s violence toward women; others have acclaimed them as shining examples of formalist experimentation.

Oppenheimer would seem at first blush to side with the latter interpretation, casting this painting amid quick cuts of sparks of light and swirls of blue. These shots, in addition to representing life moving into abstraction, are meant to connote how the titular physicist has begun to conceive the bomb he would later realize. He is made to seem like a genius, not unlike how Picasso has long appeared to many.

Yet Picasso’s bad behavior has recently been cast as Pablo-matic, and the same could be said of Oppenheimer, who in this film is revealed to be a philanderer, dating at least two women who occupy small slices of his narrative, only to be disposed of when they’re no longer relevant to him. That Oppenheimer finds transcendence in Woman Sitting with Crossed Arms may not be so simple after all.

The painting’s appearance also may have something to do a with a small biographical detail that isn’t included in Nolan’s film at all but does appear in the book upon which it is based, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Bird and Sherwin point out that Oppenheimer’s parents maintained an art collection in his childhood home. Alongside works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh, the biographers report, there was a Blue Period Picasso painting, Mother and Child (1901). (It would appear that Bird and Sherwin are referring to a work now owned by the Harvard Art Museums, but that institution’s provenance does not list the Oppenheimer family’s collection.) If the young Oppenheimer really did see Picasso paintings such as Mother and Child, he probably would’ve appreciated the artist’s work.

Then there are the connections between Picasso’s art and science. Some have divined similarities between developments in Picasso’s art and developments in physics. In 2002, Arthur I. Miller even wrote a book that paralleled the biographies of Picasso and Albert Einstein, himself an Oppenheimer character. As Miller points out, one quote from Gertrude Stein could apply just as equally to Picasso as it could to Einstein or even Oppenheimer: “The things that Picasso could see were the things which had their own reality, reality not of things seen but of things that exist.”