Léopold Survage, “Composition with the Cock with the Faces with the Hands”, Early 1900s, Watercolor, Location Unknown
Léopold Frédéric Léopoldowitsch Survage, known as Léopold Survage, was a French painter of Russian-Danish-finnish descent born in Finland. In 1901 he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Here hs was introduced to the collections of modernist painters Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Survage exhibited in 1910 with the Jack of Diamonds avant-garde group in Moscow. The first showing of his work in France was at the 1911 Salon d’Automne, an annual exhibition in Paris.
In 1913, Survage produced abstract compositions using color and movement to evoke a type of musical sensation. Entitled Rythmes colorés, he planned to animate these illustrations by means of film to form “symphonies en couleur”. He saw these abstract images as flowing together, but he exhibited the ink wash drawings separately at the 1913 Salon d’Automne and the 1914 Salon des Indépendents
Survage moved after 1917 to Nice and, over the next eight years, produced highly structured oils and works on paper linked together by a series of leitmotifs. These repeating groups of symbolic elements, such as man, sea, building, flower, window, curtain, and bird, weere arranged as if they were protagonists in a series of moving images.
Toward the end of the 1930s, as a result of his contact with surrealist painter André Masson, Survage became increasingly charmed by symbols and mysticism. The curvilinear forms that had previously dominated his compositions came, once again, under the control of geometric structure.