STRAVINSKY AND PICASSO: COLLABORATORS, INNOVATORS, CREATORS

Nathan Cornelius

Introduction to Graduate Studies

March 15, 2013

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Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso were two of the outstanding creative geniuses of the

twentieth century, one being perhaps the leading composer of the era, the other widely

recognized as the greatest painter of his day. These two great artists were also good friends for

a significant part of their careers, together at the center of an amazingly fecund artistic scene in

Paris and Rome in the 1910s and 1920s. This paper will review the relationship between

Picasso and Stravinsky, including their association with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and

collaboration on Diaghilev’s production of Pulcinella; examine Stravinsky’s musical style as

possibly analogous to Picasso’s Cubism in its use of concepts such as primitivism, collage,

simultaneity, and relativity; and finally explore the fascinating parallels between the two artists’

creative outlooks and career arcs, notably their ability to reinvent themselves in new styles.

Given Stravinsky’s deep interest in the visual arts throughout his life, it is not surprising

that he should make close friends in that field as well as his own. Indeed, the list of painters

and sculptors with whom he was acquainted reads like an art history textbook: Rodin,

Modigliani, Monet, Kandinsky, Giacometti, Delaunay, Leger, Chagall, Brancusi, Braque, and

Rouault.1 (Stravinsky’s second wife, Vera de Bosset, was an abstract painter, and the couple

would often discuss each other’s latest work.2) Stravinsky’s interest in art was strengthened by

a circle of Russian colleagues centered on ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev and his journal “The

World of Art,” which “had from its inception at the turn of the century nurtured

interdisciplinary associations.”3 As Alexandre Benois, a fellow member of the Diaghilev circle,

1 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 86-91, 101-103.2 Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 424-426.3 Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 268.

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noted, “The ballet is one of the most consistent and complete expressions of the idea of the

Gesamtkunstwerk, the idea for which our circle was ready to give its soul.”4 Benois also

remarked on “Stravinsky’s cult of the theatre and his interest in the plastic arts. Unlike most

musicians, who are usually quite indifferent to everything that is not within their sphere,

Stravinsky was deeply interested in painting, architecture, and sculpture.”5 Although Stravinsky

was clearly interested in modern art during his early years in Russia, he did not encounter it

firsthand until his 1910 trip to Paris, the center of the artworld at that time, during which he

was so struck by Picasso’s paintings that he purchased two of them.6 Stravinsky also indicated

in his correspondence from those years that he was aware of Picasso’s work.7

However, Stravinsky did not actually meet Picasso for seven more years, after Stravinsky

had become a celebrity with the Ballets Russes’ productions of his Firebird, Rite of Spring, and

Petrushka in Paris. Eugenia Errazuriz, a patron of both Stravinsky and Picasso, had encouraged

Stravinsky to make Picasso’s acquaintance, adding, “one day . . . you must collaborate with him.

What a genius! As great as you are, cher maitre.”8 They finally met not in Paris, but in Rome in

March 1917, where Picasso was working on the sets for the Ballets Russes’ production of

Parade with playwright Jean Cocteau and composer Erik Satie, while Stravinsky was about to

conduct some of his works at a concert organized by Diaghilev.9 The Russian Revolution had

occurred just a few weeks earlier, and so “the performance opened not, as usual, with… ‘God

4 Alexandre Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, trans. Mary Britinieva (London: Putnam, 1941), 370-371.5 Ibid., 302.6 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1962), 29.7 Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 230.8 V. Stravinsky and Craft, 181.9 André Boucourechliev, Stravinsky, trans. Martin Cooper (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987), 120; Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 149; Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962), 66.

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Save the Tsar,’ since there was no longer a Tsar to save, but with Stravinsky’s orchestration of

the ‘The Song of the Volga Boatmen,’ ”10 for which Picasso gladly contributed the cover art.11

During Stravinsky’s stay in Rome, Diaghilev also organized “an exhibition of cubist and futurist

pictures by his friends and collaborators” at a reception for Stravinsky.12

When the Ballets moved on to Naples, the two artists took the opportunity to explore

the city together, lingering especially at the aquarium.13 Significantly for their later work, they

attended a traditional commedia dell’arte show “in a crowded little room reeking of garlic. The

Pulcinella was a great drunken lout whose every gesture, and probably every word if I had

understood, was obscene.”14 On another occasion, Stravinsky and Picasso “were both arrested

one night for urinating against a wall of the Galleria” but were released when the police

realized who they were.15

When Stravinsky returned to his home in Switzerland later that spring, he took with him

a portrait of himself by Picasso (Figure 1). While this portrait was not an esoteric Cubist work

but rather a simple line drawing, easily recognizable as Stravinsky, it nevertheless drew the

suspicion of the border police at Italian customs. Stravinsky recalled that “nothing in the world

would induce them to let it pass. . . . ‘It is not a portrait but a plan,’ they said. ‘Yes, the plan of

my face, but of nothing else, I replied.’”16 Finally, Stravinsky was able to get the portrait sent to

him via the British ambassador in Rome, but he ended up missing his train because of the delay

at customs. Another picture by Picasso produced better results for the composer, as his

10 Huffington, 149.11 Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 104.12 Stravinsky, Autobiography, 67.13 Ibid., 67.14 Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 105.15 Ibid., 105.16 Stravinsky, Autobiography, 68.

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drawing, consisting of a single line, appeared as the cover of the first edition of Stravinsky’s

Rag-Time (Figure 2).17

During the war years, Stravinsky had collaborated with impresarios other than Diaghilev

on his new productions Renard and The Soldier’s Tale, and in 1920, he was initially reluctant to

join another new project with the Ballets Russes.18 Diaghilev, however, insisted that Stravinsky

should arrange music by Italian Baroque composer G. B. Pergolesi for the ballet Pulcinella,

based on the traditional Neapolitan commedia dell’arte shows that Stravinsky and Picasso had

seen in Naples. Finally, Stravinsky recalls, he was persuaded by Diaghilev’s “proposal that I

should work with Picasso, who was to do the scenery and the costumes and whose art was

particularly near and dear to me, [and] recollection of our walks together and the impression

of Naples we had shared.”19 As Stravinsky told Robert Craft, “Picasso accepted the commission

to design the décors for the same reason that I agreed to arrange the music—for the fun of it—

and Diaghilev was as shocked with his set as he was with my sounds.”20 Actually, “shocked”

was an understatement; Diaghilev completely rejected Picasso’s original concept for the sets

(Figures 3-4) and costumes (Figures 5-6), persuading him to use a more traditional commedia

dell’arte style instead.21 After the premiere, all those involved in the production celebrated at

the home of a Persian aristocrat. As the festivities continued late into the night, a drunken

Stravinsky started a pillow fight among the guests.22

17 Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 67.18 Ibid., 282.19 Ibid., 286.20 Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 116.21 Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 105; Boucourechliev, 140; Huffington, 168-169.22 Boucourechliev, 141; Huffington, 170.

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“The coincidence of [choreographer] Massine’s interest in a commedia dell’arte ballet at

the precise moment when Diaghilev himself was planning an Italian project may have sparked

the conception of Pulcinella. It should be noted, however, that Diaghilev had already

envisioned . . . matching Picasso’s affection for clowns and commedia characters, already well

documented in his art, with the music of Pergolesi, which Diaghilev had discovered in libraries

in Naples and London. Whether Diaghilev’s search for a composer for Pulcinella led him directly

to Stravinsky is not clear. Diaghilev was, however, interested in bringing Stravinsky back in the

‘fold’ of the Ballets Russes” after Stravinsky had pursued several theatrical projects without

them.23 As with all Ballets Russes productions, Pulcinella was a collaboration between several

notable artists, and Diaghilev deserved much credit for bringing it all together. Indeed, “[t]he

success and artistic notoriety achieved by the Ballets Russes between the years 1909 and 1929

were due primarily to Diaghilev’s genius in perceiving the particular talents and sympathies of

the artists in his circle and bringing the most appropriate of these to each project.”24

Stravinsky viewed the project as a successful example of the Gesamtkunstwerk principle

which he loved, reflecting that “Pulcinella is one of those productions—and they are rare—

where everything harmonizes, where all the elements—subject, music, dancing, and artistic

setting—form a coherent and homogeneous whole. . . . As for Picasso, he worked miracles, and

I find it difficult to decide what was most enchanting—the coloring, the design, or the amazing

inventiveness of this remarkable man.”25 Similarly, Benois felt that Stravinsky’s “idea of

blending Pergolese’s [sic] music that he loved with a kind of mockery of it was supremely

23 Marilyn Meeker, “Putting Punch in Pulcinella: Picasso, Massine, and Stravinsky,” Dance Magazine 55, no. 4 (April 1981): 79.24 Ibid., 76.25 Stravinsky, Autobiography, 85.

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successful… [and] Picasso’s rather absurdly constructed and negligently painted décor, together

with his costumes, reminiscent of street acrobats, was in full sympathy with the music.”26 For

his part, Picasso also counted Pulcinella as his favorite Ballets Russes project.27

Marilyn Meeker notes that most Ballets Russes productions were either revivals of

forgotten works by earlier composers or innovative statements of contemporary art. “The

‘revival’ ballet pure and simple had been transformed in Pulcinella into ballet as ‘contemporary

statement’ on revival. The simple ‘pastiche’ of the eighteenth-century aesthetic had been

expanded into a twentieth-century theatric collage of simultaneous contrasting styles.”28 As

Stravinsky told Robert Craft, “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through

which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look of course . . . but it

was a look in the mirror, too.”29 These themes of collage and of discovering the past are

extremely important for understanding the works of both Stravinsky and Picasso.

At their initial meeting in Rome, Picasso, who loved to sketch his friends, had been

“particularly fascinated by the face of Stravinsky, with his thick lips, bull-fiddle nose and

protruding ears,”30 and he immediately set to work on caricaturing the composer in his

sketchbook. In addition to the drawing that caused Stravinsky so much trouble at Italian

customs, Picasso made two more portraits of Stravinsky in 1920 (Figure 7). The artist-subject

relationship ran both ways, however, as Stravinsky also drew his own fragmentary “portrait” of

Picasso (Figure 8).31 After 1920 and the successful production of Pulcinella, the two artists

26 Benois, 379.27 Meeker, 76.28 Ibid., 80.29 Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 128-29.30 Huffington, 149.31 Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 65.

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began to go their separate ways, both creatively and personally. Stravinsky told a Spanish

newspaper in 1936, “Both of us are solitaires, essentially, and we run into each other only from

time to time.” Nonetheless, he professed to “admire [Picasso] in all his tendencies; he is always

and consistently a great artist.”32 By 1964, after two decades in America, Stravinsky’s opinion of

Picasso had dimmed slightly (perhaps due to the painter’s tendency towards narcissism) but

remained admiring; as Stravinsky jotted in his copy of a biography of Picasso, “Picasso is a

monster, who at times, nevertheless, is right.”33

Stravinsky’s relationship with Picasso went beyond the personal level, however; it is

possible that Picasso influenced Stravinsky’s compositional style in some way. At the very least,

Stravinsky’s music from his “Russian” period (i.e., the 1910s and 20s) seems to have numerous

stylistic parallels with the Cubism that Picasso was articulating in art at the same time. There

was a general acknowledgment of the close relationship between music and art in the early

twentieth century: “In the nineteenth century music had come to be regarded as queen of the

arts because of its non-imitative qualities, and throughout the Cubist period musical analogies

become increasingly frequent. With the emergence of abstract painting many felt that painting

had become completely ‘musicalized.’”34 This cross-fertilization between music and art was

evident in Stravinsky’s music in several ways.

First, Picasso and Stravinsky both drew from Primitivism, a movement which broke with

traditional European notions of beauty and sought aesthetic inspiration in the art of “primitive”

cultures or of ancient times. As Glenn Watkins brilliantly explains,

32 V. Stravinsky and Craft, 327.33 Ibid., 183.34 John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis 1907-1914, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 20.

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a significant part of the twentieth-century cultural explosion, which would ultimately require reconstitution through collage, involved an obsession not so much with primitive societies of a distant past as with the search for an energizing authority in two equally elusive models—one involving outreach to geographically distant shores densely impacted with legend, and another which sought to forward the mechanisms of modern society and everyday life as contemporary counterparts to ancient ritual.35

Obviously, Stravinsky’s evocation of prehistoric ritual in The Rite of Spring is an example of the

latter kind of primitivism, while Picasso’s equally groundbreaking Demoiselles d’Avignon (Figure

9) was inspired by African masks exhibited in Paris. Both Picasso and Stravinsky also dealt in

Primitivsm by appropriating certain elements from Japanese art, with Stravinsky composing

Three Japanese Lyrics, of which he said, “the graphic solution of problems in perspective and

space shown by [Japanese] art incited me to find something analogous in music.”36

Thus, Stravinsky created his distinctive style “not so much through the appropriation of

ingredients from a particular historical or cultural model as through their fracture and

purposeful reassemblage.”37

Whether in allusions to African sculpture . . . that prized conceptual rudimentariness over perceptual beauty; whether in the formal appropriation of a trenchant haiku or a Chinese ideogram . . . whether in the arrangement of folk tunes or other derivative material shorn from anthologies as though they were prized discoveries from a field dig; or in the deconstructed guitars and clarinets, beverage and tobacco labels, as well as in the cropping of newsprint into chunks that resonated like recently discovered relics from a previous age; the ideal model for a new foundation was hypothesized.38

As mentioned above, collage, or cut-and-paste, is another important stylistic element in

both Picasso’s art and Stravinsky’s music. Picasso and his friend Georges Braque used collage

heavily in the period known as Synthetic Cubism (approximately 1912-1914—precisely the

35 Watkins, 5.36 White, 218.37 Watkins, 3.38 Ibid., 5.

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same time Stravinsky was composing Petrushka and The Rite of Spring). “As the name suggests,

cut-and-paste denotes the physical actions of cutting a piece of paper of other material and

affixing [it] to another surface, juxtaposing and arranging it with any number of other items.

The most straightforward examples of cut-and-paste are Picasso’s papier collés . . . such as

Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wineglass.”39 (Figure 10) As mentioned above, music and musical

instruments were favorite motifs of Picasso’s in these Synthetic Cubist works. Rather than

removing all representational content from his art (as Kandinsky and Mondrian did), Picasso

took fragments of realistic imagery (or even real objects) and subsumed them into a larger

whole governed by abstract design principles. Similarly, “Stravinsky, in a number of his Russian

and neoclassical compositions, replaces the more conventional diatonic means of sonic

representation with the octatonic collection. The traditional diatonic procedures do not

disappear, but become a product of the octatonic.”40

Stravinsky’s music (especially the Petrushka and The Rite of Spring) also uses collage as a

formal principle in its “juxtaposition of dissimilar musical elements ([from] sections of music to

a work’s basic motives, melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic), arranging them in a such a way that

a coherent music composition results. There are two different types of juxtaposition: 1) side-

by-side, where two different sections of music are pasted next to each other; and, 2)

simultaneous, where two different strands of music are heard at the same time.”41 Stravinsky

first used this technique of juxtaposing contrasting blocks of music in the first tableau of

39 Carl Kristian Wiens, “Igor Stravinsky and ‘Agon,’” Ph. D. diss., University of Michigan, 1997, in ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 44.40 Ibid., 59.41 Ibid., 47.

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Petrushka,42 where it effectively depicts the chaos and bustle of the Shrovetide fair and the

various characters inhabiting it. The Rite of Spring also exhibits

the technically adroit use of metric dislocation and polytonal juxtaposition of diatonic scraps fragmented from Russian folktunes. Unlike the melodies in Petrushka, however, these were now so partial or reconstituted that Stravinsky in later years was able to deny their origins altogether. In their fleeting resemblance to familiar material as well as in their incompleteness Stravinsky promoted a direct analogy with the collage assemblages of the Cubists.43

Stravinsky continued to use this “block” technique in the later works of his Russian

period, as well. Jonathan Cross compares Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments to

Picasso’s cubist drawing Standing Female Nude, in which geometric lines and arcs

intersect in such a way as to produce a pattern of repeating shapes . . . which are never identical. . . . Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments similarly articulates musical time by means of three basic (related) tempi which intersect . . . in such a way as to produce a pattern of repeating shapes, none of which is identical. . . . In the Picasso a variety of planes, individually characterized, are thus produced, the movement from one to the next forming the drawing’s primary subject matter. In the Stravinsky a variety of musical blocks, individually characterized, are similarly produced, the movement from one to the next forming the work’s primary subject matter. In both works, there is no obvious transition from one plane/block to the next: in other words, they ‘proceed’ at an immediate level by means of opposition.44

Similarly, in Les Noces, “Stravinsky places adjacent to each other distinct sections of music, each

of which differs greatly [from the others] in instrumentation, register, and texture. . . .

Throughout the longer sections, the listener is aware of a constant repetition—with only the

slightest change—within the blocks.”45 And in Pulcinella, “the simultaneity of the musical

effects—modern and traditional—offered a multi-dimensional juxtaposition which matched

42 Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29.43 Watkins, 234.44 Cross, 19.45 Shirley Krug McKamie, “Three Cubist Portraits: An Examination of the Related Aspects of Time Manipulation and Amorality within Gertrude Stein's Word Portrait ‘Picasso’ (1909), Pablo Picasso's ‘Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’ (1910), and Igor Stravinsky's Portrait of a Peasant Bride in the First Tableau of ‘Les Noces’ (1917),” master’s thesis, Truman State University, 1999, in ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 104, 107.

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Picasso’s placement of traditional Neapolitan costuming against cubistic sets and Massine’s

mixture of comic gesture and popular dance styles with classical ballet technique.”46

Stravinsky and Picasso also shared a propensity to challenge traditional notions of space

and time in their work, replacing them with multiple viewpoints and the simultaneity of

disparate events.47 As Tom Gordon observes,

In painting, the positioning of objects typically implies a spatial relationship that in turn may suggest temporal values. In the twentieth century, however, numerous forces have conspired to attempt a new depiction of time on the canvas and to flirt with the notion of portraying dislocations in time as well as simultaneity on a two-dimensional surface. The first approaches to Cubism around 1908 were fundamentally centered on an investigation of this very issue.48

These developments were inspired in part by contemporary developments in science,

notably Einstein’s theory of relativity, which implied that space and time were not absolute but

relative to each other. Einstein’s “concept of malleable time was a tremendous impetus to

cubist experimentation.”49

The agencies of polychords, polytonality, and polystylistic reference as employed by the composers in promoting illusions in space and time during the first years of the century reflect a powerful and universal concern. Proust, Bergson, Picasso, Cendrars, Delaunay—they all pondered the imponderability of nonlinear time and intimated their suspicion that the answers were to be found not in science but in art.50

In an attempt to find these answers, Picasso and Braque (especially in the period known as

Analytic Cubism, 1908-1911) depicted objects from multiple angles in the same picture,

creating a hazy, ambiguous spatial context around them. This multifaceted depiction of space

46 Meeker, 80.47 Tom Gordon, “The Cubist Metaphor: Picasso in Stravinsky Criticism,” Current Musicology 40 (1985): 28.48 Watkins, 216-217.49 McKamie, 113.50 Watkins, 226.

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implied a corresponding progression through time, as a certain amount of time would be

necessary for an observer to move to the different viewpoints that make up the image.

Stravinsky’s use of contrasting “blocks” in music accomplished a similar result: “in his

flagrant shearing of prior definitions of musical space and time, he proclaimed a new and

joltingly ambiguous terrain demonstrably akin to the reassessment of the visual plane.”51 The

Cubist art critic Ricciotto Canudo wrote in Montjoie! magazine in 1914 that Stravinsky “partakes

of our aesthetic, of Cubism, of synchronism, of . . . simultaneity.”52 Léon Oleggini also sees

Stravinsky’s music as

the first application of a relativist or Einsteinian conception of space and time to the arts. . . . As Picasso realized three [or four] dimensions in two without illusion . . . Stravinsky achieved a musical past, present, and future (previously dependent on the roles of memory and anticipation in the psychological perception of music) within the ontological now.53

Perhaps the most telling parallel between Stravinsky’s musical style and Picasso’s

Cubism comes from the composer’s own hand. In his published Conversations with Igor

Stravinsky, Robert Craft asked Stravinsky to draw a graphical representation of his music;

Stravinsky drew a collection of dots connected into a twisted figure by straight lines intersecting

at various angles (Figure 11).54 This drawing bears a striking resemblance to Picasso’s schematic

renderings of musical instruments from 1924 (Figure 12).55 It is impossible to say whether

Stravinsky’s acquaintance with—and admiration for—Picasso influenced his own musical style,

or whether he discovered musical “Cubism” independently of his painter friend. Either way, it

is clear that the two geniuses accomplished similar innovations in their respective disciplines

51 Ibid., 234.52 Golding, 23.53 Gordon, 28.54 Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 108.55 Watkins, 270-271.

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and, in so doing, both reflected and profoundly shaped the cultural ethos of the twentieth

century.

The similarities between Picasso and Stravinsky go even beyond their personal styles at

the time they met. For both artists, their styles continued to evolve over time and followed

similar arcs over the course of their careers. Howard Gardner, who has compared the creativity

of several great innovators of the modern world, including Picasso and Stravinsky, in his book

Creating Minds, summarizes many of the salient parallels between their lives:

The two men were born a year apart, both of them somewhat outside the orbit of mainstream Western European culture. Both gravitated to and made their first major splashes in Paris in the early 1900s, with Picasso more precocious than Stravinsky. Their most determinedly avant-garde works were produced in the years just before the Great War, with Picasso working alongside Braque, and Stravinsky immersed in the world of the Ballets Russes. During the war both tread water to a certain extent, with Picasso also meeting his first wife, who interestingly enough, turned out to be a member of the Ballets Russes. Then, around the end of the war, both men embraced a middle-class life in Paris and moved into a neoclassical phase of creation, during which each was quite cognizant of what the other was doing.56

Both Picasso and Stravinsky rose to fame with an initial, radical breakthrough in Les Demoiselles

d’Avignon and The Rite of Spring and followed with a less radical, but more comprehensive,

breakthrough about a decade later in Guernica and Les Noces, respectively.57

These remarkable parallels are, of course, due in part to a common cultural setting, with

both men spending much time in Paris in the 1910s and 20s. It is possible, nonetheless, that

internal factors—the artists’ own creative temperaments—were responsible for their mirroring

creative paths. First of all, both Stravinsky and Picasso were clearly formalists in their

aesthetics. Stravinsky is well-known for saying that “music, is by its very nature, powerless to

56 Gardner, 216.57 Ibid., 370; White, 62.

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express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a

phenomenon of nature, etc.”58 As Stravinsky remarked to Craft,

what a Picasso or a Stravinsky has to say about music is of no value whatever from that side. . . . The composer works through a perceptual, not a conceptual, process. He perceives, he selects, he combines, and he is not in the least aware at what point meaning of a different sort and significance grow into his work. All he knows or cares about is his apprehension of the contour of the form, for the form is everything. He can say nothing whatever about meanings.59

According to Gordon, Stravinsky and Picasso wanted to replace “art’s illusion of physical

or emotional description with the objective reality of the work itself. . . . In place of moving the

listener . . . Stravinsky and Picasso offered a new formalism.”60 Gordon quotes contemporary

critic Boris de Schloezer: “The painter [and] the sculptor, as a rule, start with reality and

transmute it; Picasso works on something that has already been transmuted, on pictorial forms

which he reorganizes. Stravinsky operates similarly in his field[;] he creates with something

that has already been created.”61 The result was that Stravinsky and Picasso produced “works

devoid of explicit expressive intent and yet paradoxically capable of a greater, more profound

intensity of expression. This intensity of expression resulted from a formalistic rather than

descriptive orientation in the work, one where elements of sound and image were free to attain

their own value. The work itself was pure, an object unto itself.”62

This belief in the intrinsic value of the artistic elements of a work had profound

consequences for Stravinsky’s and Picasso’s development as artists. Both men seemed to be

constantly reinventing their styles over their careers, surprising their audiences with each new

58 Stravinsky, Autobiography, 53.59 Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 116.60 Gordon, 25-26.61 Ibid., 27.62 Ibid., 27.

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work. “The recurring surprise resulted from the artists’ attitude that each new work was a

problem to be solved, a problem that set its own terms and determined a unique solution. . . .

For both Stravinsky and Picasso, this approach was the only sure antidote to the habits that a

lingering romanticism had ingrained in the creative process.”63 “ This denial of the habits of

creation had as its intent the rejection of one of the most fundamental conventions of all the

arts: that the work of art is itself a metaphor for some element of physical or psychological

reality.”64 Thus, Stravinsky and Picasso’s belief in formalism over expressionism, combined with

their technical mastery of their medium, freed them to work in whatever style best suited their

sonic or visual materials.

Gardner also notes how the two creators’ cultural background may have fueled their

drive to avoid becoming conventional in their work—even according to the conventions of a

style that they themselves had invented. Coming from countries on the fringe of Europe and

living as exile in Paris, both Stravinsky and Picasso were culturally somewhat marginal, and they

used this “marginality as a leverage in work. . . . Whenever they risked becoming members of

‘the establishment,’ they would again shift course to attain at least intellectual marginality. . . .

Picasso and Stravinsky renounced first the mainstream artistic heritage and, in later decades,

their own unrelenting departures from it.”65

One of the primary ways Stravinsky and Picasso moved beyond their own innovations

was through dialogue with artists of the past. Shortly after the time of their collaboration,

beginning in the 1920s, both artists entered a period often described as Neoclassical. In this

period, “both artists found pleasure and stimulus in recalling earlier masterpieces by other

63 Ibid., 24.64 Ibid., 25.65 Gardner, 368.

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artists (e.g., Grunewald, Cranach, Velasquez, Ingres etc. – Gesualdo, Pergolesi, Bach,

[T]chaikovsky, etc.).”66 As mentioned previously, Pulcinella was a seminal work for Stravinsky in

this regard, and his comment that “It was a backward look, . . . but it was a look in the mirror,

too”67 is revealing, as this collaborative project showed him the path to finding himself in the

works of past composers. A similar shift occurred in Picasso’s work around the time of

Pulcinella, too, as “Picasso’s reintroduction of the figure and perspective confirmed a

Neoclassical realignment of the forces of Cubism. The fracture of analytic Cubism that had

been partially healed in the synthetic phase around 1912-1914 was now subject to a new

degree of integration.”68

Gardner surmises that, for such a brazen innovator as Stravinsky or Picasso, “because

one has already made a decisive break with the past, it is no longer perceived as a crushing

weight. . . . I submit that for Stravinsky and Picasso the opportunity to engage in a stimulating

and sustaining dialectic with the past was one of the prime reasons each could contribute

creatively for so long. Reworking and learning from the past, they discovered further

dimensions of their own voices.”69

Earlier in his life, Stravinsky received needed cognitive and affective support from Diaghilev and Roerich, as well as from members of his tight-knit ensemble. In the absence of such support, Stravinsky might well have been unable to break away from the Rimsky-Korsakov mode of Fireworks and The Firebird and develop the more innovative languages of Le sacre and Les noces. During his middle years, Stravinsky enjoyed the support of a wide circle of friends and followers; but, like Picasso, he seems to have conducted his neoclassical experimentation in conversation with his redoubtable predecessors as much as with his illustrious contemporaries.70

66 White, 63.67 Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 129.68 Watkins, 274.69 Gardner, 216.70 Ibid., 224-225.

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Picasso likewise seems to have felt a closer connection to the old masters than to any of his

contemporaries besides Matisse.71

Hans Keller, in his essay “Stravinsky Heard,” notes that Stravinsky’s continued evolution

of style eventually brought him back into contact with his contemporaries when he embarked

on serial compositions in the 1950s. “[I]n Stravinsky, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method

eventually produced one of those profound changes of creative mind of which no other great

creator, with the possible exception of Picasso, has ever been capable.”72 Nonetheless,

Stravinsky and Picasso were very rare in their ability to identify with the work of others without

weakening their own creative voice.

Ordinary artistic development always starts with identification: while the composer’s creative ego is still weak, he identifies himself with his teachers and with older masters, and proceeds to imitate them. . . . Alone amongst geniuses, again with the possible exception of Picasso, Stravinsky actually developed his capacity for identification together with the unfolding of his intense originality.73

In conclusion, it is clear Stravinsky and Picasso were more than just coincidental friends

and collaborators. They were, perhaps, the greatest innovators of the twentieth century in

their respective domains, as they explored revolutionary new Cubist notions of fragmented

space and time through their work. Their formalist aesthetics, however, led them to embrace

each new work on its own terms, so that their styles continued to evolve even after they had

achieved recognition and success. In both cases, this evolution led them back to the past, as

they sought themselves in the works of the old masters, a journey sparked by their joint

exploration of eighteenth-century music and traditional commedia dell’arte in Pulcinella.

71 Ibid., 379.72 Hans Keller, “Stravinsky Heard,” in Hans Keller and Milein Cosman, Stravinsky the Music-Maker: Writings, Prints, and Drawings, ed. Martin Anderson (London: Toccata Press, 2010), 127.73 Ibid., 129.

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Although their collaboration with each other and with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was

temporary, its effects were incredibly fruitful, lasting for the rest of their careers and leaving a

permanent mark on the history of twentieth-century art and music.

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Cross, Jonathan. The Stravinsky Legacy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Gardner, Howard. Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

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Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. London: Faber and Faber, 1959.

------. Expositions and Developments. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1962.

Stravinsky, Vera, and Robert Craft. Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.

Watkins, Glenn. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

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Figure 1. Pablo Picasso, drawing of Igor Stravinsky, 1917, from Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 64.

Figure 2. Pablo Picasso, drawing for cover of “Ragtime,” 1919.

Figure 3. Pablo Picasso, set design for Pulcinella, 1920, from Alexander Schouvaloff and Victor Borovsky, Stravinsky on Stage (London: Stainer and Bell, 1982), 98. Photo courtesy of Musées Nationaux, Paris.

Figure 4. Pablo Picasso, curtain design for Pulcinella, 1920.

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Figure 5. Pablo Picasso, costume design for Pulcinella, 1920.

Figure 6. Pablo Picasso, costume design for Pimpinella, 1920, from Alexander Schouvaloff and Victor Borovsky, Stravinsky on Stage (London: Stainer and Bell, 1982), 102. Photo courtesy of Musées Nationaux, Paris.

Figure 7. Pablo Picasso, drawing of Igor Stravinsky, 1920.

Figure 8. Igor Stravinsky, drawing of Pablo Picasso, 1920, from Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 64.

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Figure 9. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Figure 10. Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wineglass, 1912, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio.

Figure 11. From Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 108.

Figure 12. Pablo Picasso, Drawings, 1924, as published in La Révolution surrealiste, January 15, 1925, 16-17.