Water carrier in Collioure, 1926
 A cubist, surrealist and dreamlike work by the Paris school painter Léopold Survage depicting a water carrier in Collioure, dated 1926.
A painting with a very balanced and rich composition due to the presence of different elements: the city, human presence, vegetation, the sea, the sky, a window open onto a vanishing point...
 
 Oil on canvas signed and dated 1926 lower left
Dimensions: 65 54 cm x
With frame: 90 x 79 cm
 
Provenance: former Thierry Le Luron collection
Mrs. Anne Marie Di Vieto confirmed that the work is indeed listed in her archives.
 
 Survage appears as a true transmitter of modernity. 
"He shuts us up" (Juan Gris) 
A work from the “Collioure years”
 
Between 1925 and 1932, Léopold Survage made several trips to Collioure, a Mediterranean port where Matisse and Derain, a few years earlier, had produced some of the masterpieces of Fauvism. He then moved away from the Cubism and abstraction of his early days. The light and architecture so characteristic of the city determined his paintings.
In Collioure, Survage revisits the myth of the Mediterranean woman, alternately a carrier, a fish seller, dreaming at the window... works through which Survage brings back to life ancient tragedy and allegories.
 (“Exhibition catalogue Survage: the Collioure years, 1925-1932: exhibition, Collioure, Museum of Modern Art, from June 16 to September 30, 2012”)
The discovery of Collioure in the 1920s is also characterized by a new range of warmer colors with ochres, browns. The graphics are simplified.
 
 Léopold Survage, “unclassifiable artist”, is a major artist of the 20th century.
 Throughout his life, Léopold Survage remained an unclassifiable artist, between cubism and surrealism, between figuration and abstraction. He denies the pure cubism of the still lifes of Braque and Picasso and introduces architecture, landscape and always a character in connection with his environment.
The figures are schematized and, most often, located in an urban environment. In his colorful canvases, he abolishes the rules of traditional perspective.
The painter was able to create a totally personal language to deliver his poetic vision of the universe, through metaphors and decipherable symbols...
 
Biography
 Born in Moscow to a Finnish father and a Danish mother, naturalized French in 1927, Léopold Survage is a painter of multiple origins.
 The Russian Years
 His father, Leopold Edward Stürzwage, was a citizen of Villmanstrand (Finland). Leopold Survage was baptized in the Protestant religion. In 1886 he lost his mother and the following year entered the Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul school. After leaving high school he entered his father's piano factory from 1897 to 1900. Fascinated at a very young age by drawing and painting, he entered the Moscow School of Fine Arts in 1899 with Constantin Korovin and Leonid Pasternak, and visited Shchukin's private collection: Manet, Gauguin, the Impressionists, Matisse, etc.
In Moscow he participated in various exhibitions including the one called "Stephanos" in 1907-1908 at the house of the Stroganov school and the "Jack of Diamonds" in 1910-1911. In the meantime his ruined father liquidated his affairs. They left for Paris in July 1908.
 The Paris School
 Arriving in Paris, he worked as a piano tuner at the Pleyel house. Then he met Archipenko again, whom he had seen in Moscow, and took courses at the Académie Matisse and the Académie Colarossi. First exhibitions from 1911 and, in 1914, the principles of "coloured rhythm" by which an analogy is found between coloured visual form and music, are established.
 Introduced by Guillaume Apollinaire into the circle of Baroness Hélène d'Oettingen, with whom he had a romantic relationship.
He met André Salmon, Picasso, Gino Severini, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, etc. His autograph signature appears on one of the pages signed by the guests at the memorable banquet given on December 31, 1916 in honor of Apollinaire at the Ancien Palais d'Orléans on Avenue du Maine.
 At the Salon des Indépendants in 1914 he showed colored rhythms, which he wanted to achieve in cinema, anticipating research into abstract cinema. 
In 1915 Survage left for Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat with the Baroness of Oettingen and remained on the Côte d'Azur until the end of the war. There he met his future wife, Germaine Meyer. In a letter to Léopold Zborowski dated December 31, 1918, Modigliani wrote: "I am making the bomb with Survage at the Coq d'Or... The champagne is flowing freely." Apollinaire organized Survage's first exhibition at the Bongard gallery in 1917, bringing together thirty-two of his paintings. In 1920 Survage filed the statutes of the "Section d'Or" of which he was a founder with Albert Gleizes and Archipenko, Braque. 
This association is responsible for organizing exhibitions in France and abroad. In 1921, he participated in the exhibition "The Masters of Cubism" at the Galerie de L'Effort moderne. In 1922 he exhibited at Léonce Rosenberg, participated in the first exhibition of the Section d'Or in Italy in Rome, then a group exhibition at the Weill gallery with Henri Hayden, Auguste Herbin, Irène Lagut, Jean Metzinger and Severini.
 From 1922, Survage worked for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and designed the sets and costumes for Igor Stravinsky's opera buffa, Mavra. In 1927, an article by Samuel Putnam on Survage in the Chicago Evening Post preceded a solo exhibition in Chicago at the Chester Johnson Galleries. He then pursued an international career with numerous solo and group exhibitions in France and abroad. 
He made fabric designs for the house of Chanel and religious compositions such as the crucifixion for the Turku Cathedral in Finland in 1930. In 1937, he made a series of monumental panels for the railway palace at the Exposition des Arts et Techniques in Paris. These canvases measuring 15,5 meters by 4 meters high will receive the gold medal.
He devoted himself to monumental painting in the 1950s and 1960s: a fresco on the theme of Peace at the Palais des Congrès in Liège which led him to stay in Belgium for eighteen months in 1958, he designed cartoons of Le Coq et le Cheval for the Manufacture des Gobelins and illustrated literary works.
On March 12, 1963, he was named an Officer of the Legion of Honor.
 
Bibliography
 • Survage: the Collioure years, 1925-1932: exhibition, Collioure, Museum of Modern Art, from June 16 to September 30, 2012
• Daniel Abadie, Survage in a single stroke. Preface to the Survage exhibition at the Galerie Saint-Germain in 1974.
 • Serge Fauchereau, Some remarks. Preface to the exhibition Survage in 1990.
• Léopold Survage, Entertainment. Notebooks of the Abbey of Sainte-Croix, Les Sables-d'Olonne, 1975.
 • Writings on painting, followed by Survage in the light of criticism, L'Archipel publisher, Par is, 1992.
 • Jeanine Warnod, Survage, André De Rache publisher, Brussels, 1983.
 • Daniel Abadie, Survage, the heroic years, Anthese, 1993.
 • Daniel Abadie, Survage: the Collioure years, 1925-1932, Somogy, Paris, 2012.
 
Museums
 In France
 • Paris, National Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris
• Céret, Museum of Modern Art of Céret
• Lyon, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon 
• Béziers, Béziers Museum of Fine Arts. 
• Alès, Pierre-André-Benoit Museum-Library
• Nevers, Municipal Museum 
 Abroad
 • San Francisco, museum of Modern Art 
• New York, museum of Modern Art 
• Geneva, Petit Palais Museum 
• Prague, National Gallery of Prague
• Liège, congress center 
 Source
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léopold_Survage
https://www.mchampetier.com/biographie-Léopold-Survage.html
https://www.gazette-drouot.com/article/l-univers-selon-leopold-survage/13091
 
https://www.connaissancedesarts.com/arts-expositions/survage-ni-cubiste-ni-abstrait-au-musee-de-la-faience-et-des-beaux-arts-de-nevers-1192603/