Leopold Survage

Leopold Survage was one of the first artists to theorize and design a work of abstract animation. Due to WWI none of his ideas were brought to fruition until recently. Here is a letter that Survage wrote explaining his ideas.

"Color, Movement, Rhythm
     Painting, having liberated itself from the conventional forms of objects in the exterior world, has conquered the terrain of abstract forms.  It must get rid of its last and principal shackle - immobility - so as to become as supple and rich a means of expressing our emotions as music is.  Everything that is accessible to us has its duration in time, which finds its strongest manifestation in rhythm, action, and movement, real, arranged and unarranged.
     I will animate my painting, I will give it movement.  I will introduce rhythm into the concrete action of my abstract painting, born of my interior life; my instrument will be the cinematographic film, this true symbol of accumulated movement.  It will execute the "scores" of my visions, corresponding to my state of mind in its successive phases.
     I am creating a new visual art in time, that of colored rhythm and of rhythmic color."
                                                                                                             Paris, 1914
                                                                                                           -Leopold Survage