Léopold
SURVAGE

Leopold Survage was born in Russia on July 31, 1879 to a Finnish father and a Danish mother. He was born in the same land as his paternal grandfather, who had founded a piano manufacturing business upon his arrival in the country, which was passed down from father to son. At a very early age, the young Survage showed a growing interest and a definite aptitude for drawing. His father firmly dissuaded him from taking the path of art. In the early 1900's, against his father's advice, which left him destitute, he enrolled in the Moscow School of Fine Arts. Life became hard for the apprentice artist who managed, with the help of a few friends, to find enough to live on. But very quickly, the true personality of Leopold Survage appears. Indeed, of his two teachers in Moscow, Pasternak and Korovine, neither satisfied the artistic appetite of the young man, everything was too slow, too codified for his taste.

At the same time, he mingles with all the avant-garde movements that are gradually flooding Moscow. 
He participated in the Stephanos exhibition in 1907. It was in this new and unprecedented effervescence that he met Alexander Archipenko, his future companion. These movements also made it possible to bring to Russia the currents and artists who were then animating the French Salons and galleries; Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, all came together to satisfy Survage's appetite, who finally discovered his masters and guides in painting. Soon, the question would arise of leaving Russia and moving to France to follow in the footsteps of his favorite artists. In 1909 he left Moscow for good, accompanied by his wife. 

Paris, the beating heart of pictorial modernity
 

Upon his arrival in Paris, Léopold Survage's dearest wish was to attend the classes given by Henri Matisse in the Academy of Painting that he had set up in the former Sacré-Coeur convent. Survage was elated and placed great hopes on this teaching. At the same time, he met his friend Archipenko who had come to Paris a few months earlier. The latter brought Survage to all the intellectual and artistic circles of Paris. But unfortunately, the causes of his disappointment were repeated with Matisse; Survage understood but quickly became bored, he quickly came to the conclusion that painting is innate, it is certainly constructed but the creative base, the basis of all expression, must be pre-existing. It is by looking at the works of Cézanne and Gauguin that he realizes the path he must take and the lines he must follow. Rhythm on the one hand, that carried by Cézanne, and spirituality on the other, embodied by Gauguin, such were the two qualities that he set up as precepts and that would guide his painting from then on. In this new approach, always very personal, Survage tried to bring a synthesis of the different movements that were then crossing France and the world of painting. Some say that he was trying to link Cézanne and Cubism in order to transcend both. Indeed, the successive disappointments of the young painter, sometimes in Russia at the School of Fine Arts, sometimes in Paris with Matisse, made him realize that he could only reveal himself by creating his own way. This is the paradox that surrounds the personality of Leopold Survage, a discreet man, a dreamer, out of touch with the things of life, almost self-effacing and yet implacable when it comes to choosing a means of artistic expression.  In the 1920s, Survage explains his thoughts at length in the magazine Action, "Cahiers de philosophie et d'art". He explains his research, his experiments and what he expects from painting.

The encounter with the light

A few years earlier, the war pushed Léopold Survage to go to Nice in 1914. This change allowed him to open a new phase in his creative process, known as his "pink period". Survage began to present so-called "symbolic" canvases, cutting the canvas into several distinct elements that were superimposed and gradually integrated into the composition. The tree becomes the leaf, the house becomes a door, the symbol replaces the idea, the thought is synthetic and reduced to its simplest element.

Between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, Survage discovered Collioure, the town that had previously welcomed Maillol, Henri Martin, Matisse, Signac, Derain and even André Masson. These stays in Collioure had the effect of freeing Survage's line, he reinvented himself and returned to the experiments that had always been part of his way of creating and painting. All this light allows Survage to renew his relationship with color, and even more so, to reintroduce characters into his compositions. The woman occupies a central place during this period, he represents her in all forms, for example his work Bathers, which is one of the many female representations of this period. He dwells at length on women's occupations, on situations of daily life and also takes up religious scenes. In 1927, Léopold Survage became a French citizen.
 

The 1937 International Exhibition in Paris and the 1940 earthquake

The 1937 International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques was a real opportunity for Léopold Survage. He had been wanting to paint on large surfaces for many years and this exhibition gave him the opportunity. In fact, it was Robert Delaunay who approached Survage, his old friend, directly to collaborate on this major project. Thus, alongside Dufy, Léger, Herbin, Metzinger and Valmier who had also received commissions, Delaunay and Survage set to work; they were in charge of decorating the Palais des Chemins de Fer and the Palais de l'Aviation. Survage's work for the Palais des Chemins de Fer earned him a gold medal.

The announcement of the declaration of war with Germany deeply shocked the artist, who in reaction chose the myth of Icarus in his work The Fall of Icarus in 1940; a way for him to exorcise his anguish in the face of the peril that had just begun. Throughout the conflict, Survage threw all of his favourite themes onto the canvas, certainly to take refuge in a universe that he mastered, sheltered from the madness of men.

Thus, since 1945, Leopold Survage enjoys a fame and an important activity. He exhibited all over the world and was part of several groups and movements; whether it was the cubists or abstraction, Survage always found a place of choice. At the end of the war, Survage produced a number of important works such as Papillon, L'oiseleur and Pax.

The latest experiments 
 

Léopold Survage, true to form, continued to research, experiment and discover new processes and ways of painting. One of his great obsessions is to ensure that his work will live on. He takes as an example the mosaics and ceramics discovered in Pompeii which, two thousand years later, still retain their former brilliance; Survage is fascinated. Thus, he devotes, among other things, the last decades of his life to the preparation of a perfect coating for the fresco of one hundred and twenty-five meters long that he is charged to realize in 1959 for the Palais du Congrès in Liege. 
Léopold Survage died at the age of eighty-nine in Paris.