Léopold Survage

Jacques Tronche, Paris
Private Collection, Paris (acquired in the late 1970s)

Paris, Musée Galliera, Survage. Exposition rétrospective, 1966, no. 28

The canvas is relined. There are localised zones of hairline horizontal craquelure that have led to minor flaking and some pinhole losses. UV light reveals some retouching in the blue/green pigment in the upper right corner and two spots in the pink near the lower left corner. Smaller dots also fluoresce in the ochre yellow in the centre of the composition and in the light green in the upper left corner. Otherwise this work remains in overall good condition. A professional restorer has confirmed that the canvas could be unlined and the craquelure reduced without the need for retouching.
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Living on the French Riviera from June 1915 to 1919, Leopold Survage painted a series of landscapes and town and village scenes in soft colours based on frontal compositions combining house interiors and exterior facades.  Depth is expressed by a superposition of planes. Emblematic of this “rose” period, this view of Mont Agel juxtaposes architectural forms in a selection of bright and vibrant colours, a possible extension of the abstract research conducted by artist in the years 1912-1913 on the subject of rhythm and colour, or "colourful rhythms".

After an initial musical education in Moscow, Survage studied painting, sculpture and architecture during which he became acquainted with Archipenko, Larionov, Malevich and Pevsner.  Attracted by the painting of Gauguin and Matisse that he discovered in the collector Chtchoukine’s gallery, Survage moved to Paris in 1909 where he exhibited two years later in the Cubist room of the Salon des Independants of 1911. Introduced by Archipenko to the milieu of the Soirees de Paris, he met Guillaume Apollinaire who wrote a preface for his first solo exhibition of thirty-two paintings at the Gallery Bongard in 1917, the year in which the present painting was executed. With the support of the poet, Survage abandoned his experimentation with purely abstract, colourful rhythms in favour of a "synthetic visual space" where realistic patterns are sublimated in prismatic perspectives. Works from this period, such as this view of Mont Agel (1917), are highly decorative and have aesthetic qualities that could almost qualify as theatrical, this multiplication of registers and planes evoking a kind of "mental theatre" (Daniel Abadie (ed.), Survage les années héroïques, Troyes , Musée d’Art moderne, 1993, p. 9).