Einstein×Kahlo

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on STUDY HALL: Albert Einstein and Frida Kahlo, on On the bad habit they trained out of themselves, and how long it took.
2. 00:10
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You know, Frida, I think perhaps the worst habit I had to break was... mm, how to say it... the need to be polite to bad ideas. To nod along when someone said something that made no sense, just to avoid the argument.
3. 00:22
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   Ha! You? I cannot picture this. You are the man who told the entire physics establishment they were wrong about time itself.
4. 00:29
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Yes, but that came later, after much difficulty. When I was young, working at the patent office, I would sit in meetings and someone would present nonsense and I would think, well, perhaps I am missing something. Perhaps I should not speak up. This is a terrible habit for a scientist.
5. 00:43
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   How long did it take you to stop?
6. 00:45
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Oh, years. Many years. Even into my thirties I would sometimes catch myself doing it. The real change came when I realized that being kind to a bad idea is actually cruel to the truth. And to the person with the bad idea, also, because you let them continue in error.
7. 01:02
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   That is a very German way of thinking about kindness.
8. 01:05
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Perhaps! But tell me, what was your bad habit?
9. 01:07
   Frida Kahloshare moment

   Painting for other people. For their comfort. Making myself smaller in my own work.
10. 01:13
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You? But your paintings are so... I mean, they are not comfortable at all. This is what makes them powerful.
11. 01:18
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Now, yes. But when I was younger, after the accident, after the surgeries, I would paint pretty things. Flowers that were just flowers. Portraits that made people look better than they were. Diego would look at them and say they were fine, which is the worst thing an artist can hear.
12. 01:36
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Fine. Yes. This is death by faint praise.
13. 01:38
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I knew I had things inside me that were not fine. Not pretty. The pain, the anger, the way my body had betrayed me. But I thought, who wants to see that? Who wants to hang that on their wall?
14. 01:49
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    When did you stop caring what they wanted?
15. 01:52
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I don't know if there was one moment. It was more like... bleeding through. First a little blood in one painting, then more truth in the next. By the time I painted 'The Broken Column,' I had stopped asking permission to show what was real.
16. 02:06
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    How old were you then?
17. 02:07
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Maybe thirty-seven, thirty-eight. So it took me nearly twenty years from when I started painting seriously. Twenty years to find my own voice.
18. 02:16
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is interesting, because I think we both had the same problem from different directions. You were hiding what you saw. I was hiding what I thought.
19. 02:22
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    And both of us were doing it to avoid making people uncomfortable.
20. 02:26
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Exactly so. But here is what puzzles me about your case. You were painting your own face, your own body, your own pain. How could you hide from yourself?
21. 02:36
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Very easily. You make the pain decorative. You paint yourself with a nice background, good composition, traditional technique. You turn suffering into something formal and distant. A self-portrait that is not really about the self.
22. 02:51
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ah. Like writing an equation that is mathematically correct but says nothing new about the universe.
23. 02:56
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Yes, exactly like that. It is a kind of cowardice that looks like work.
24. 03:00
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Mmm. I knew this well at the patent office. I could have spent my whole life evaluating other people's inventions, doing competent work, going home tired. And I almost convinced myself this was enough.
25. 03:12
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    What stopped you?
26. 03:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I think it was partly that I could not stand my own boredom anymore. And partly Michele, my first wife, she would get angry with me. She would say, Albert, you have all these ideas written in notebooks, when are you going to do something with them? She was not always patient with me, but in this case her impatience was useful.
27. 03:31
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Diego was like this too, sometimes. He could be terrible in many ways, but he never wanted me to make small art. He would rather I paint something that made him angry than something that made him feel nothing.
28. 03:43
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes! This is important. The people around us who refuse to let us be mediocre.
29. 03:47
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    But they cannot break the habit for you. That is your own work.
30. 03:51
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Absolutely. I remember the exact moment when I decided to stop being polite. It was a symposium in 1909, I was speaking about light quanta, and Max Planck himself stood up and said, well, very diplomatically, that perhaps I had gone too far with this idea. And I felt that old pull to say, oh yes, perhaps you are right, Professor Planck, forgive me.
31. 04:12
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    But you didn't.
32. 04:13
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No. Instead I said, with respect, I think the mathematics shows clearly that I have not gone far enough. And then I sat down. My hands were shaking.
33. 04:21
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Good. Fear means you are doing something real.
34. 04:24
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You know, I think the habit we are discussing, it comes from wanting to belong. To be accepted. When I was young in Germany, I was Jewish, I was not a good student in the traditional way, I had no academic position. I wanted very much to be part of the scientific community.
35. 04:39
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    And I wanted to be part of the art world in Mexico City, to be taken seriously, to not be just Diego Rivera's wife who paints as a hobby.
36. 04:47
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So we both learned to make ourselves acceptable. To smooth the sharp edges.
37. 04:51
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Until we realized that the sharp edges were the only part worth keeping.
38. 04:55
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But it is not easy to live with sharp edges. People cut themselves on you and then they complain.
39. 05:00
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Let them complain. I spent too many years in bed, unable to move, unable to do anything but think. I decided that when I could move, when I could paint, I would not waste time on comfortable lies.
40. 05:11
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes, and I spent too many years watching time tick by on the patent office clock. When I finally understood that time itself is not what we thought, I was not going to pretend otherwise just to make Newton's followers feel better.
41. 05:23
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    So we both had our conversions. Our moments of deciding.
42. 05:27
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Although I think it was not really one moment, not for either of us. It was many small moments of choosing the truth over comfort, until finally the habit of honesty became stronger than the habit of politeness.
43. 05:38
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    Yes. And even then, even after you know better, sometimes the old habit creeps back. I would catch myself making a brushstroke that was pretty instead of true, and I would have to paint over it.
44. 05:50
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I still do this! Even now, sometimes in a lecture I will start to soften an idea, to make it more palatable, and then I stop myself. I think, no, Albert, say what you mean. If they do not understand, that is a different problem.
45. 06:04
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    The habit we trained out of ourselves is the habit of betraying ourselves.
46. 06:08
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    That is it exactly. And it is the hardest habit to break because the betrayal feels like kindness. It feels like getting along, being reasonable, not making trouble.
47. 06:17
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    But it is poison. Sweet poison.
48. 06:20
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    How long would you say it took you, really, to break it? You said twenty years to find your voice, but to completely stop the habit?
49. 06:26
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    I don't know if I ever completely stopped. I died at forty-seven. Maybe if I had lived to be old like you, I would still be fighting it.
50. 06:34
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I am seventy-six now, and I am still fighting it. So perhaps the answer is: it takes your whole life. The habit never fully dies. You just get better at catching yourself.
51. 06:44
    Frida Kahloshare moment

    That is not a very satisfying answer.
52. 06:46
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No. But it is an honest one.