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Title: Picasso’s Violin: “W
Title: Picasso’s Violin: “White Noise” and the Art of Elena Guro and Lyubov Popova Author: Juliette Stapanian-Apkarian, Emory University Email: russjsa@emory.edu Appearing in traditional art such as still-lifes, musical instruments also intrigued many early modernist artists. Pablo Picasso’s work includes diverse images of instruments, and his “Violin” (1912) was a cubist experiment well known to Russian artists through Shchukin’s collection and journal reproductions. In the vibrant debates of the early twentieth-century, Picasso’s work elicited a wide range of responses by Russian artists and writers. Among these responses is the work of two women: Elena Guro’s poetic prose piece entitled “Picasso’s Violin” (1913) and Lyubov Popova’s painting “Violin” (1915). While Guro (1887-1913) worked at the threshold between Symbolism and Cubo-Futurism, and Popova (1889-1924) would move from Cubo-Futurism to become a leading figure in Constructivism, a close look at their artistic “dialogue” with Picasso’s piece reveals some striking parallels in their differences with Picasso’s vision. To explore their responses to Picasso, this study draws on the concept of “white noise” not only as a productive framework to help understand complexities in inter-art moves toward abstraction but also to explore their possible gendered and historicized implications. This paper draws on the insights of previous scholarship, and is part of a broader study on the “Russian Futurist Feminine.“