Painting a picture of a creative partnership

IT ALL started because the bus was late. On tour in LA with his dance company, Merce Cunningham was packed and ready to leave when he learned that their coach was delayed by two hours. Looking for a way to pass the time, he sat down at the table in his hotel room and started to sketch the branches of a tree outside.

That morning in LA more than 20 years ago, Cunningham barely noticed the hours fly by. "The future was clear," he wrote later. "In any free moment, look about and draw."

Now 88 and still working, Cunningham is a titan in the world of avant-garde choreography, just as his partner and collaborator, John Cage, who died in 1992, was preeminent among modern composers. But what is less well known is that both men also produced - and in Cunningham's case is still producing - significant bodies of work in visual art.

Their drawings and paintings will be shown for the first time in the UK at Inverleith House this spring. Honouring the use that both made of "chance procedures", the show will open with a selection of works by Cage, which will be replaced, gradually, with works by Cunningham. The random order of the substitution will be determined by dice thrown by Cunningham in New York.

Paul Nesbitt, curator of Inverleith House, has long nursed an ambition to bring the work of the two to Scotland. "If an artist is known for doing a particular thing, it's very easy to stereotype them and sideline the other aspects of their creative output," he says. "Lots of artists have more than one string to their bow, and if they're prolific and consistent it's important to look at that."

On the surface, at least, the two bodies of work are very different. Cage's work, created by painting round rocks gathered from the New river near Ray Cass's Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia, are abstracts with a Zen-like stillness. Cunningham draws animals and plants, real and fantastical, colourful, quirky and full of movement.

But side-by-side they reach a kind of accommodation. As composer and choreographer, they pioneered the idea that music and dance co-existed, equal but separate, within the same time frame, neither slavishly dependent on the other. Cage once said: "Merce does his thing and I do mine, and for your convenience we put it together." In a gallery, their drawings work the same way.

The show will suggest how their work has become interwoven through their lifelong collaboration. Cage's paintings will be shown alongside a film of Cunningham dancing, and Cunningham's drawings with a film of Cage - who was, among other things, a world authority on mycology - collecting mushrooms.

The two met at the Cornish School in Seattle in the 1930s where Cunningham was a student, and Cage was hired as a pianist to accompany dance classes. They met again in New York in the 1940s, where Cunningham had joined the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Cage hoped to further his career as a composer. It was at Cage's suggestion that they first worked together, staging a show in a small theatre in New York in 1944, beginning a partnership, personal and professional, which would last until Cage's death nearly 50 years later.

While Cunningham pioneered ideas of "non-representative dance" - no implied narrative, relationship or meaning, just movement, Cage was challenging the fundamentals of music with his innovative structures, instrumentation and silences.

In the 1950s at Black Mountain College, as Cunningham launched his own dance company, Cage composed his most famous and controversial work, 4'33", a three-movement work of total silence.

Influenced by Dadaism, Zen and the i ching, and by Einstein's assertion that "there are no fixed points in space" (from which the title of this exhibition is taken) both began to use "chance procedures" - making decisions by dice or coin toss - to take their work in new directions.

Though Cunningham and Cage would work closely together for half a century, they always refused to talk about their personal relationship. Victoria Miguel of the John Cage Trust says: "Someone repeatedly asked the two of them when they were on a panel together about the nature of their relationship, and John said, 'I make the dinner and Merce does the dishes.' That's as close as he was going to go. They never talked about it and, out of respect for them, we leave it at that."

Their work brought them into collaboration with many of the leading visual artists of the day - Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and others - which created a fruitful cross-fertilisation between the art forms.

Miguel says: "There is a school of thought that says Rauschenberg's white paintings are inspired by Cage's silent piece, and there is another that says Cage was inspired to make the silent piece by seeing the white paintings. I don't think it's as clean as that. Creative people discuss things, there's a definite bleeding of ideas."

Cage would say later that he had enjoyed both music and visual art as a student, but that Schoenberg, under whom he studied in LA, forced him to choose between them.

"He said that if he wanted to be a composer, he had to choose only music, which he did," says Miguel. "He didn't make visual work for about 30 years."

However, in 1969, he made Not Wanting To Say Anything About Marcel, a work using Plexiglas, as a response to the death of Marcel Duchamp.

"He was in a taxi with Jasper Johns and they were both asked to say something about Duchamp, who had just died," says Miguel. "Neither of them wanted to say anything, because nothing would have been enough."

He began to make visual art regularly in the 1970s, using chance procedures in a way that echoes his approach to composing music. But this chance was anything but random.

"Using chance operations is not as loose as one might think," says Miguel. "It's not going to work unless you set boundaries, you need to ask the right questions."

Although he was by then much in demand as a composer, he diligently applied himself to visual art during the last 20 years of his life, producing numerous series of drawings, paintings and prints.

"He enjoyed it. He enjoyed doing anything creative, he was a famously good cook, very very inventive. His scores are incredibly beautiful to look at, so there was always a visual aesthetic at work. With the events at Black Mountain College in the 1960s, he got to the point where conceptual art drew close to contemporary music. He was incredibly influential to people who made conceptual art, and still is today."

While Cage was rediscovering his paintbrush in Virginia, Cunningham was in LA, looking at a tree and picking up a pen. He has drawn ever since, making a point of drawing every morning as he scribbles daily jottings in his journal. He shares Cage's view that drawing "sobers and quiets the mind" and uses it to take a break from choreography. Despite advancing years, he remains astonishingly productive.

He has said: "One of the pleasures of drawing for me is the rapidity with which one ceases to have concerns about oneself. The intensity of trying to capture the line and the sense of something in nature becomes absorbing enough to hold all one's attention.

"I just enjoy drawing. I don't do it with any sense of it being art. I'm very pleased that people want to see the drawings. But I don't push that."

Miguel says Cunningham's drawings also relate to his choreography: "There is so much of nature in Merce's choreography. I believe the drawings are related to his character and the subjects he chooses. They are concerned with how things move, how the foot lies, how a creature gets from A to B."

Though their visual art is very different, it shares deep-level similarities. Both artists refuse to be easily pigeon-holed. Both shared an unbridled joy in their life and creativity, even in old age.

Miguel says: "The works are similar in that they are both about peacefulness, openness to the world and fascination with the world around them."

• No Fixed Points: Drawings by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Inverleith House, Edinburgh, until 8 July: 1-13 May (Cage), 15 May to 24 June (both), 26 June to 8 July (Cunningham). There will be an all-day programme of John Cage music on 24 June.

• Our apologies to Graeme Murdoch, whose name was incorrectly spelled in the feature on yesterday's arts pages.