The painting of Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso and the music of Igor Stravinsky are frequently cited as the most prominent examples of primitivism in art. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, is "primitivist" in so far as its programmatic subject is a pagan rite: a human sacrifice in pre-Christian Russia. It employs harsh dissonance and loud, repetitive rhythms to depict "Dionysian" modernism, i.e., abandonment of inhibition (restraint standing for civilization).