Léopold Survage

LÉOPOLD SURVAGE (Finland, 1879 - France, 1968).
"Divertissement", 1944.
Ink on paper.
Signed and dated.
Work reproduced in the catalog of the anthological exhibition "Leopold Survage. 1879-1968" (number 6 of the catalog), held at the Fine Art Gallery of Barcelona in 2004.
Measurements: 27 x 21 cm; 46,5 x 40 cm (frame).

In this original drawing by Léopold Survage we can appreciate the melting pot of surrealist and cubist influences from which he draws with a free spirit in order to create his own plastic universe. We are before a work of his maturity period, when he had already filtered with avant-garde movements while always preserving his intellectual independence and enjoyed international projection.

A French painter of Russian, Danish and Finnish descent, Survage found his vocation in painting at the age of twenty-two, after a serious illness. He entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and joined the Russian avant-garde movements. During these years he exhibited with O. Arjipenko, David and Validimir Burliuk, Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. In 1908 he settles in Paris, where he works as a piano tuner and attends, although for a short time, Henri Matisse's studio. During these years he continues to participate in exhibitions of the Russian avant-garde (exhibition of the group "Diamond Valet" in Moscow in 1910), and in 1911 he appears in Paris at the Salon d'Automne. From 1912, Survage composes abstract works entitled "Colored Rhythm". His idea was to animate his work by means of film projections that used color and spatial movement to evoke sensations. His idea was that these abstract images would flow together to form "symphonies in color," but he exhibited them separately at the 1913 Salon d'Automne and the 1914 Salon des Indépendants. Articles about these works were published by Guillaume Apollinaire and Survage himself. To develop his ideas, he applied to the Gaumont company in June 1914 for funding to make abstract films, so he would have predated V. Eggeling and H. Richter. After a period of abstract experimentation, during his stay in Nice at the end of the 1910s he would compose moving images of great symbolic charge. Around 1922, Survage evolved from cubism to neoclassical forms. That same year, the Paris Opera commissioned him to design the sets and costumes for Stranvinski's opera buffa "Mavra". In 1930, he took part in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at the end of the 1930s, influenced by André Masson, the painter was increasingly seduced by symbols and mystical elements. The curvilinear forms of his previous periods return to his work, although controlled by a rigorous geometric structure. Survage was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1963. He is currently represented in the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem, the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon, the Petit Palais in Geneva, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the National Museum of Modern Art in Athens.