Léopold Survage

(French, 1879–1968)

Léopold Survage was a Finnish-born French artist who produced dynamic abstractions of city scenes. Fracturing perspectival space into planar segments, he constructed multiple viewpoints within larger compositions. In this way, structures, flowers, trees, curtains, and birds are reorganized into a fragmented yet coherent pictorial space. In what is perhaps his best-known series, Colored Rhythm: Study for the Film (1913), Survage sought to create a sense of animation through the static medium of painting. “Colored music is in no way an illustration or an interpretation of a musical work,” he once explained. “It is an autonomous art, although based on the same psychological principles as music.” Born on July 31, 1879 in Lappeenranta, Finland, Survage intended to take on his father’s piano factory business but instead studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, where met Alexander Archipenko. The artist moved to Paris in 1910, where he became the studio mate of Amedeo Modigliani and began designing sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. After coming under the influence of the Surrealist André Masson in the 1930’s, Survage’s subject matter became increasingly mystical. The artist died on October 31, 1968 in Paris, France. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others.