French painter of Russian-Danish-Finnish descent.
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 Salon d’Automne in 1913 and Salon des Indépendants in 1914.
Beginning in 1917, Survage shared a studio—and a penchant for alcoholic excesses—with Amedeo Modigliani in Paris. Survage later moved to Nice and, over the next eight years, produced highly structured oils and works on paper linked together by a series of leitmotifs, repeating groups of symbolic elements—man, sea, building, flower, window, curtain, bird—as if they were protagonists in a series of moving images.
By 1922, Survage had begun to move away from Cubism in favour of the neo-classical form. He was perhaps influenced by commissions for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, beginning with sets and costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s opera buffa Mavra at the Paris Opéra in 1922. Although mainly a painter, he also produced stage, tapestry, and textile designs during this period (notably for the house of Chanel in 1933).
Survage was inducted into France’s Légion d’Honneur in 1963. He died on 31 October 1968.
Link to Wikipedia biography