Born in Finland in 1879, Leopold Survage received artistic training at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, where he met fellow artist Alexander Archipenko.
In 1909, he settled in Paris where he worked as a piano tuner, a skill he learned working in his father’s piano factory in Finland, and attended the school of Henri Matisse. In 1911, at the urging of Archipenko, he showed at the significant avant-garde exhibition, the Salon d’Autumne. By 1912, he developed a new style of painting he deemed rythme colore, with the aim, similarly to Wassily Kandinsky, to convey an idea of music. He planned an ambitious project of a three-minute film which, with the technology of the time, would have required thousands of artworks to create each frame. He unsuccessfully applied for a patent and eventually the film was abandoned due to the difficulties. Should he have succeeded, he would have been the first to develop abstract films.
His rythme colore style gained significant recognition by the most important critic of the time, Guillaume Apollinaire, who also championed the work of the Cubists, and who had a significant impact on Survage’s own work and to whom the present work owes a debt. In 1914, the same year as the present work, Survage was deemed unfit for military service and spent World War I painting on the Côte d’Azur. When he had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Bongard in 1917, Apollinaire wrote the catalogue preface. Apollinaire succumbed to injuries sustained in battle on Armistice Day in 1918 and Survage would lose a key promoter of his work.
By 1922, Survage was working with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russe, devising scenes and costumes for the Stravinsky ballet Mavra. In 1963, he was named an Officer of the Légion d’Honneur. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée national d'art moderne Georges Pompidou; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Musée des beaux-arts, Lyon.