The Greek sculptor Takis, who has died at 93 during the run of an acclaimed Tate retrospective of his ingenious creations, was half artist and half mad scientist. His works of art look like experiments – because that’s what they are. He tapped into the fundamental forces of magnetism and electricity to make eerily beautiful contraptions that illuminate modern physics.
When Takis started to make scientific art in the 1950s, he was defying a widespread belief that art and science were incompatible and opposite ways of seeing the world. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the use of lethal gas at Auschwitz tainted science in the eyes of many artists and writers. Meanwhile, scientists saw the cultural elite as snobbish and pretentious – or so claimed CP Snow in his 1959 lecture The Two Cultures. Yet while Snow’s claims about science and art as two hostile cultures were prompting earnest radio and TV debates, Takis was happily playing in no man’s land with bits of wire and magnetised nails. He came up with the idea of magnetised sculpture in 1959, the year of Snow’s lecture. From then on, he created one eye-popping magnetic marvel after another in some of the defining artworks of the 1960s.
The basic premise of these experimental sculptures is beautifully simple: a powerful magnet or electromagnet (a coiled wire that becomes magnetic when current passes through it) can make the right-sized iron object defy gravity. Takis made metal cones hover in space before a monochrome canvas in his 1959-60 Telepainting, and suspended nails without visible support in his 1968 piece Magnetron. These are wonders of nature. They make the invisible fields that define the cosmos visible.
Instead of fearing modern physics for its unleashing of atomic power, these sculptures urge, we should see the beauty it unveils. It had, in fact, taken more than a century for an artist to exploit electromagnetism. The shape of magnetic fields and their interrelationship with electricity was demonstrated in the early 19th century by Michael Faraday and theorised by the Victorian physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Maybe the significance of this long-established knowledge for Takis was that it led to the scientific revolution of his own time. Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetism was the first step towards the disconcerting revelations of 20th-century physics. It opened a window on the “spooky actions” (in Albert Einstein’s words) that govern nature according to quantum mechanics. The natural world is not what we think it is. At the level of the smallest particles, it is governed by probability, chance and mysterious entanglements.
You can’t make quantum phenomena directly visible – they are too small – but you can make a magnet’s power visible with some iron and string. Takis had hit on a simple way to show that nature is much stranger than we think it is. Why did it take a Greek artist to reveal this? The reasons may go deep. For one thing, Takis remembered that in his childhood Athens had hardly any electric light. When he visited postwar London – which was grey and austere by today’s standards – he was amazed by the bright lights. This helped inspire another strand of his art, in which he explored electricity and electric light with simple illuminated columns and elaborate flashing lightboxes. The fact that he came from what was still a very rural society in his youth gave Takis a sense of wonder about the modern technological world.
But most significantly, his art is not just an illustration of modern science. It is also rooted in ancient Greek philosophy. The Athenian philosopher Plato claimed we are like prisoners in a cave whose only clues about the outside world are shadows on a wall. In other words, the truth about reality is hidden from us. We see surfaces. The real world exists beyond those surfaces – and philosophy discovers it.
Takis may have been the last artistic follower of Plato. Using magnets and electricity, he set out to reveal what is hidden – to offer a glimpse of the invisible truth of the cosmos. In some of his most beautiful works he uses magnetism to invisibly pluck strings and create an ethereal chiming sound. The ancient Greeks would have called it the music of the spheres. Takis was an artist who heard, and shared, that music.
