Madame Stravinsky Known As Artist

Press, Volume C, Issue 29672, 16 November 1961, Page 2

Madame Stravinsky Known As Artist

-TM Pratt" Special Service AUCKLAND, November 15. Madame Stravinsky, wife of the celebrated composer and conductor Igor Stravinsky, is visiting the North Island with her husband. A well-known artist, Madame Stravinsky is preparing for her own exhibition to be held in New York in January. But she always put her husband’s music before her painting and travelled for six months of the year with her husband, she said in an interview on her arrival in Auckland.

Her work has been exhi- : bited in Rome, Venice, Milan, I Tokyo, New York and other 1 cities. She began painting ; about 1940. She uses oils and paints only abstracts—moods, fantasy and sometimes landscapes. j Born in Russia of French ; and Swedish parents. ! Madame Stravinsky was Miss Vera de Bosset Sudekine be- 1 fore her marriage to Igor Stravinsky in 1940. She went 1 to Paris to live at the begin- 1 ning of the Russian revolu- 1 tion and first admired the music of Stravinsky when . she was with the Diaghilev ; Ballet Russe. She designed • costumes for Diaghilev’s bat- \ lets and played the role of the Queen in “Sleeping Madame Stravinsky has ] lived ’■in many countries s throughout Europe. She and ! her husband have made their ’

home in Hollywood, but she singles out New York as the most beautiful city in which she has lived. Husband’s Critic Although she learned the piano as a child, Madame Stravinsky does not play any musical instrument how. Nevertheless, music has become the pivot on which her life revolves. She attends every concert her husband conducts and often offers criticism from the point of view of audience reaction. Madame Stravinsky speaks English, French, German, Russian and a little Italian and enjoys reading in her leisure time. In their Hollywood home they have a library of 5000 books, ineluding a large collection of art books which She tikes to browse through in th* evenings. She claims T. S. Eliot as her •’hero.” Dylan Thomas. Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh are her favourite writers, all of whom she has known personally.

Asked whether she enjoys spending half the year travelling, Madame Stravinsky dismissed the idea as “hell.” It was not only exhausting to both of them, but it meant constantly packing and unpacking “and always the wrong clothes,” Madame Stravinsky said.