Watch Pablo Picasso’s Creative Process Unfold in Real-Time: Rare Footage Shows Him Creating Drawings of Faces, Bulls & Chickens

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Pablo Picas­so was born not long before the inven­tion of the motion pic­ture. With a dif­fer­ent set of incli­na­tions, he might have become one of the most dar­ing pio­neers of that medi­um. Instead, as we know, he mas­tered and then prac­ti­cal­ly rein­vent­ed the much old­er art form of paint­ing. That said, cin­e­ma did seem to have been fas­ci­nat­ed by both Picas­so’s work and the man him­self. He made a cameo appear­ance in Jean Cocteau’s Tes­ta­ment of Orpheus in 1960, a few years after play­ing the title role in Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot’s doc­u­men­tary Le Mys­tère Picas­so. The short clip from the lat­ter above shows how Picas­so could cre­ate an expres­sive face with just a few strokes of a pen.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxes8pyHkJc

By the time he made Le Mys­tère Picas­so, Clouzot was already well estab­lished as a direc­tor of ele­vat­ed genre films, hav­ing just made Le salaire de la peur or (The Wages of Fear) and Les dia­boliques (or Dia­bolique), which would turn out to be one of his defin­ing works.

To film­go­ers fol­low­ing his career, it may have come as a sur­prise to see […]

How Steven Soderbergh Directs a Scene & Makes It Great

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Steven Soder­bergh was one of the ear­li­est film­mak­ers to break out in what’s now called the “Indiewood” move­ment of the nine­teen-nineties. He was ear­ly enough, in fact, to have done so in the eight­ies, with the Palme d’Or-win­ning Sex, Lies, and Video­tape. His sub­se­quent films have been many and var­ied, even more so than those…

The World Record for the Shortest Math Article: 2 Words

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In 2004, John Con­way and Alexan­der Soifer, both work­ing on math­e­mat­ics at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, sub­mit­ted to the Amer­i­can Math­e­mat­i­cal Month­ly what they believed was “a new world record in the num­ber of words in a [math] paper.”

Soifer explains: “On April 28, 2004 … I sub­mit­ted our paper that includ­ed just two words, ‘n2…

The PhD Theses of Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein & Others, Explained with Illustrations

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Raise your chil­dren with a love of sci­ence, and there’s a decent chance they’ll grow up want­i­ng to be like Richard Feyn­man, Marie Curie, Albert Ein­stein, or any num­ber of oth­er famous sci­en­tists from his­to­ry. Luck­i­ly for them, they won’t yet have learned that the pur­suit of such a career will almost cer­tain­ly entail…

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Einstein & Coltrane Shared Improvisation and Intuition in Common

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Sci­en­tists need hob­bies. The gru­el­ing work of nav­i­gat­ing com­plex the­o­ry and the pol­i­tics of acad­e­mia can get to a per­son, even one as laid back as Brown Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor and astro­physi­cist Stephon Alexan­der. So Alexan­der plays the sax­o­phone, though at this point it may not be accu­rate to call his avo­ca­tion a spare time…