Date: 1951
Creator of the image: Arthur Sasse
Date of the image creation: 1951
Medium of the image: Photograph
Person depicted: Albert Einstein
As Albert Einstein left his 72nd birthday celebrations, he turned around and playfully stuck his tough out at a group of photographers. Arthur Sasse captured the moment, which was later chosen by Einstein himself to put on a greeting card that he sent out to friends. This famous photograph of the theoretical physicist has since been used on t-shirts and mugs, and has been parodied in various ways.
Einstein’s expressive face and wild, distinctive hair contributed to giving him a public image of a ‘mad scientist’. Setting aside his genius — indeed his name is now synonymous with that attribution — Einstein was decidedly not mad. He was physicist, a lover of music, a socialist, and someone who meditated on the pantheistic nature of god. According to fellow physicist Robert Oppenheimer who gave a speech at Einstein’s memorial: ‘He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness ... There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn’.
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