Collection: Léopold Survage   1879 - 1968  Follow artist

Léopold Frédéric Léopoldowitsch Survage was a Russian-French painter of Finnish origin. Trained in Moscow, he identified with the Russian avant-garde before moving to Paris, where he shared a studio with Amedeo Modigliani and experimented with abstract films.

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. The influence may have been Marc Chagall's, an artist well known for his insertions of floating couples, cows, roosters, and sundry Jewish iconography.