The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (21 page)

A
lthough not as commonly known as Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard was one of the most original and creative scientists of the twentieth century. With Enrico Fermi, Szilard is largely credited with creating the first nuclear fission reactor and for fundamental work in modern cybernetic or information theory. It was also Szilard who convinced Einstein to write the famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 resulting in the establishment of the top-secret Manhattan Project and the atomic destruction of 170,000 Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ending the Second World War. Szilard was active as well in biological research, was concerned, especially in his last years, with the role of science in keeping the peace, and developed the idea of the “think tank” where distinguished thinkers could combine social and scientific ideas into something new (first realized at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California).

He was born in Budapest. Szilard’s father was a successful engineer and architect who raised his three children in affluence. Szilard, however, was not well as a child and in his early youth was tutored at home by his mother. Later, he trained in electrical engineering, only to be interrupted during the First World War by military service in the Austro-Hungarian Army, continuing his studies after the war in Berlin, Szilard found himself drawn to physics, seeking out the best teachers and gradually taking his place in prestigious research laboratories.

During these early years in Berlin, Szilard became a regular visitor to Einstein’s home. Szilard displayed to Einstein an inventive and practical side marked by remarkable theoretical intuition. They soon secured a series of patents in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States for a heat pump, which later would be used to control the temperature of nuclear reactors.

With the rise of Hitler in 1933, Szilard fled Germany for England. On March 12, 1934, Szilard applied to the Admiralty for a secret patent. He sought it in secret out of the fear that its use could lead to the most violent explosion. The patent was for a nuclear fission chain reactor.

Szilard’s concept of a chain reaction came to him in a flash. He had been reading a newspaper story of a scientist’s hopes for freeing atomic energy. Szilard observed that if one could find an element which when split by neutrons would absorb one neutron while releasing two neutrons, such an element if put together in a large mass might sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

The English, however, did not provide Szilard with the support he needed for his research. When he reached the United States in 1938, Szilard learned for the first time that the German Otto Hahn had split the uranium atom, thereby uncovering nuclear fission. Confirming his later nickname as the “gray eminence of physics,” Szilard carefully noted that the German discovery of fission would most likely lead to the release of nuclear energy through an explosive device.

Under the auspices of Columbia University, Szilard began experiments to show the number of neutrons released during fission and how they were released. His research with Fermi led to the first controlled chain reaction on December 2, 1942. This experiment as well as Szilard’s pressure on Einstein to write to Roosevelt led the U.S. government to establish the top-secret Manhattan Project, which produced the bomb that ended the war.

Niels Bohr had predicted that the manmade creation of nuclear energy would not be practicable. Through a superhuman effort, Szilard and other immigrant physicists proved Bohr wrong. Indeed, the German effort was hampered by the loss of Jewish émigrés like Szilard to America. In 1945 the U.S. military, rather than invading Japan and exposing its forces to countless casualties, chose to explode the bomb over civilian populations. Szilard, again with Einstein’s help, had sought to influence President Harry Truman to display the first atomic bomb to the Japanese in a nonlethal way. Truman’s choice to ignore their pleas ended the war, but left a scar on human history that will not heal. Despite the bitter experience of the firebombing by conventional methods of Tokyo and Dresden (far more destructive than the first atomic weapons), mankind now knew full well the wider implications of nuclear holocaust.

The incredibly destructive force of the bomb was however only one use of the nuclear chain reactor. Szilard’s discoveries led to the establishment of nuclear fission as an alternative (yet still controversial) energy source. His scientific impulses tied to political action before the war enabled America to be on guard against Germany’s nuclear threat and to halt the Pacific war. After the war, Szilard’s lobbying for the peaceful development of nuclear energy successfully influenced postwar congressional legislation to establish civilian controls.

Not surprisingly, Szilard’s research after the war turned to life. After important studies of viruses and bacteria, Szilard published a paper on the aging process, which today remains influential. It was as if the horrors of the atomic forces he had helped release (guided by the theories and presence of his mentor, Einstein) made him seek comfort in the life-giving secrets of biology.

F
ourteen years after Jackson Pollock’s tragic death in a wild car accident in East Hampton on the South Fork of Long Island, his great rival, Mark Rothko, committed suicide in a New York City studio by slitting his wrists and draining his red blood slowly in the sink. Rothko had told his friends that while it could not be definitely proven that Pollock’s death was a suicide, everyone would know when Mark Rothko ended his life.

When Pollock died, his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, had him buried beneath a great rock in the local town cemetery, not far from the scene of his fatal accident. Due to Pollock’s notoriety and the sensationalism that surrounded his death (one young woman died in the accident and the only survivor, his mistress, was thrown safely into the brush), Pollock’s final resting place, Green River Cemetery, became a sort of gathering spot for art world figures dead and alive. In the macabre words of a local, everyone was dying to get in. The remains of the poet Frank O’Hara and the painters Ad Reinhardt (a suicide by hanging) and Stuart Davis joined Pollock in a final who’s who of postwar artists.

Rothko, however, was buried by his friend the painter Theodoros Stamos in a small church graveyard in East Marion on the North Fork of Long Island. Stamos had built a dramatic house on stilts near the bluffs facing Long Island Sound and chose in a dramatic gesture (some people felt aimed at Pollock) the less trendy, quiet North Fork town for Rothko’s last resting place. His gravestone was more modest than Pollock’s big boulder. Rothko’s last resting place was to be with strangers, far away from the art world.

Although Jackson Pollock is viewed by many as the leading advocate of the school of painters known as the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, Mark Rothko remains its most humane and expressive proponent. Rothko in life as in death was separate and apart from the other abstract painters. As Pollock freed line from the constraints of known shapes, instilling his paintings with a newfound energy and spirit, Rothko’s equivalent achievement was the liberation of color from realistic confines. In the 1950s and 1960s he displayed in a trailblazing series of paintings the power of pure color to evoke deeply felt emotion, solemnity, and majesty. His release of color from recognizable designs forever influenced how art is viewed and created.

A painter’s work is best viewed rather than written about. Imagine, then, large canvases with blocks of color floating against each other in horizontal duos, trios, and quartets. It all seems so simple, yet simply right, as if one had never seen colors interact like this before.

The Abstract Expressionists (Rothko hated the label) were reacting against the almost socialist realism of the Depression years with revolutionary approaches to painting. Pollock led the fight with his remarkably energetic paintings of dancing lines. Rothko turned away from his early socially concerned realistic style and used the primacy of color in amorphous shapes to express tragedy, ecstasy, or doom. Using compelling coloristic images, Rothko was able to evoke a religiosity, mystery, and timelessness unique to his generation. None of the other painters of the period, including Barnett Newman, Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, or Franz Kline, achieved as consistently as Rothko the immediacy of feeling and thought brought about by his friction of colors, glowing and shifting, vibrant or restrained, always alive (that is, until the dark last years).

Rothko was born Marcus Rothkovich in an area of Latvia from which Aaron Copland could also trace his roots. His father was a prosperous pharmacist who enrolled his youngest son, Marcus, in religious school or
Heder
. Like many Jews of that time, faced with the conscription of his two eldest sons into the Russian army, Rothko’s father brought the family to America in 1913. Upon arrival their name was changed to Rothkowitz, and they made their way west, settling in Portland, Oregon. Raised in Portland by his widowed mother (his father had suddenly died shortly after they came to Oregon), Rothko’s teens were spent in poverty. Nevertheless, in the early 1920s he went to Yale, did not finish his schooling, acted for a while (Clark Gable was once his understudy), and then journeyed to New York to study painting at the Art Students League, eventually under the influential Max Weber. Soon he married, seemingly just to get married, was then bitterly unhappy, and worked in a series of menial jobs to support his new family. These odd jobs were finally interrupted by that great artists’ collective supported by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (WPA). While working for the WPA during these Depression years, he first met de Kooning, Gottlieb, and Pollock, and as the war approached, many of the great contemporary European painters threatened by the Nazi peril arrived in New York. The combination of European influence, the Depression, and American patriotism seemed to have a catalytic effect, for in the early 1940s the styles of many of the young Americans began to change, marking the beginning of a golden age of modern art. Toward the end of the war, Rothkowitz changed his name to Rothko, divorced his first wife, remarried (this time happily), and suppressed his earlier socially realistic paintings, displaying with gradual success a more abstract style.

After the war, New York became the world capital of art (although most people did not yet realize it). The great European refugees had returned home, leaving the younger men and a few women to develop their unique ways. The works of these mostly New York artists hang now in our most prestigious galleries, but in the late 1940s, they could not sell a painting. The WPA had brought many of them together, and they continually influenced each other, frequently visiting one another’s studios, meeting socially to discuss literature and politics and to drink, standing apart from the conventional mores of society, often identifying with the downtrodden and the poor. They began to show their works, often together, in the handful of galleries, which would recognize their emerging talents. They experimented with new concepts of form, line, color, and shape. The message was often in the materials used, not in the use of materials.

Although very much a part of the New York School, Rothko never forgot to instill in his paintings strong emotive messages.

Artist Mark Rothko and his three-year-old son Christopher.

He desired to elicit not only intellectual responses or excitement from his viewers, but preferably their deepest feelings and wants. As his art gained wider recognition, Rothko, like most of his generation, did not know how to react. The incredible surges of emotion required for his art taxed him severely. He made bad business connections, which would later lead to the great scandal surrounding his estate and the theft of many of his paintings. His bright colors gradually deepened in shade, reflecting a darkening mood. Rothko’s increasing fame brought important commissions, including the request by the wealthy de Menil family of Houston to create a chapel with huge murals. These dark, brooding works, in shifting browns and black, are more gloomy than tragic, large screams of pain rather than majestic symbols. After the de Menil chapel, his final paintings continued to display the darkest hues available; in their smaller scale they were more expressive, but still cold and tired.