Pavel Filonov
Russian Painter, Art Theorist, and Poet
Moscow, Russia
St. Petersburg, Russia
Summary of Pavel Filonov
Filonov is best known as the founder of Analytical Realism, a uniquely Russian style of art that is distinguished by an extraordinary attention to detail. Filonov's mantra, to "paint every atom, with exactitude and perseverance", gave rise to a striking body of work characterized by kaleidoscopic mosaics of color. Despite the fact that the complexity and ambition of his painting was quite unlike anything else produced under the flag of early 20th century modernism, Filonov was all but unknown outside of his own country. Even then, he was, like other Russian avant gardists of his generation, denounced as a Formalist, and ostracized as an enemy of Social Realist art. Filonov fervently believed that the physical needs of the artist must become secondary to the artwork itself. Earning his meagre income from odd-jobs, refusing to sell his art (preferring to bequeath it to the State) or to take payment for his teaching. Filonov existed on a basic diet of bread and potatoes and, already emaciated, he was one of the first to die of starvation during the infamous Nazi Siege of Leningrad.
Accomplishments
- Filonov's method of "Analytic Art" stemmed from the idea that a painting should grow in the same way as any organic form. Typically, he would start a corner of his canvas and work his way up and across to picture surface to its opposite edges. His paintings were not planned, but rather subject to their own laws of evolution. The artist Marina Koldobskaya described Filonov's canvases as "pulsating and breathing crystals, knots and nets flowing into each other before the eyes of the onlookers".
- Filonov believed that the world was full of things that went unseen by the human eye. He proposed an art that activated what he called the "knowing eye"; that is, one informed by a combination of intuition and knowledge. His ideas were at the root of his formation of the school, Masters of Analytical Art which, over its relatively short lifespan, marked the high point in Soviet avant garde art.
- Filonov's style of "painted tapestry" was testament to his unwavering commitment to the production of intricate compositional structures. He presented his viewers with a picture surface in which they must engage with active and overlapping visual fields that have no perceptible corelation. It was the artist's conviction that this technique would deliver his audience to a higher intellectual and emotional plane.
- Despite being ostracized by the Soviet state, Filonov remained a fully committed patriot and socialist who held strong moral objections to the idea that he should profit financially from his art. He believed that his paintings should be viewed as whole corpus of work that belonged, not to merchants and collectors, but to the Russian people. In line with his wishes (and aside from a few pieces he gifted to friends) Filonov's vast body of work found its rightful home posthumously in the Russian Museum, Leningrad (St. Petersburg).
The Life of Pavel Filonov
Art critic Rober Chandler says of Filonov's art, "Figurative elements, geometric and organic forms, aspects of Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and Russian Symbolism - all these are fused together, at the service of a unique and unmistakable vision".
Progression of Art
Man and Woman
Produced during the period when Filonov was involved with the Union of Youth group, it features two large, elongated figures, one male, and one female, who dominate the center frame. As both are unclothed, they are understood by many observers to represent Adam and Eve. The pair stand in the midst of a chaotic and overwhelming urban scene, effectively "penned in" by stacked buildings, and surrounded by distorted human, and some animal, figures (foreshadowing the artist's later preoccupation with the theme of the interconnectedness of all living things). Although the work is not as finely detailed as Filonov's mature work, Man and Woman still employs a complex layering of textures and colors with the busy and dense scene surrounding the main figures likely intended to represent their inner emotional and psychological states. As art historian Alena Esaulova observes, "some researchers [have interpreted the painting] as a tragic song of loneliness, of alienation".
Historian Ksenia Svishchenko, noted that, in general, Filonov represented rural life "as a source of vitality and purity, in contrast to the city that destroys and oppresses". But as scholar Derek C. Maus remarks, Filonov's focus on urban life was also "in keeping both with the standard revolutionary sentiment of the time and with Futurism". Indeed, Maus remarks that while the artist's "heavily fragmented painting style" is often presented as standing alone amongst other avant-garde movements, his early career paintings "show significant affinities with many of the other schools of art active during this period". However, Man and Woman was produced at the same time Filonov published his essay, "The Canon and the Law" (1912), in which he first expounded his ideas on Analytical Realism. It carried a biting critique of Cubism on the grounds that it had become the "new academicism", and as such, the avant-garde had effectively come to a "dead end". Filonov announced the role of the artist was to reveal a subject's inner essence (here, "loneliness and alienation") rather than represent the world in terms of a "superficial geometry" (as he saw Cubism).
Watercolor, brown ink, Indian ink, feather, brush on paper - Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
Peasant Family (Holy Family)
In this painting Filonov, who was raised as a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, presents a peasant man, woman, and naked child, in a composition that is strongly reminiscent of traditional imagery of the Holy Family. Svishchenko notes that "We can see on the Peasant Family that Filonov follows the canon of the Russian Orthodox iconography: faces should have been represented with large eyes, thin lips, and a straight nose; the figures should have looked immobile and devoid of outward expressiveness". The figures are joined by several animals, including a rooster, a pheasant, a horse, and a dog (or wolf). The artist viewed humans and animals as equals, and he communicates that belief by portraying the animals with human expressions and by placing all living beings in a tight arrangement. Arts researcher Luydmila Pravoverova has said the narrative in this work is "pushed back to the beginning of history, when people, animals, and birds existed in felicitous harmony".
All additional space in the painting is packed with detail, including flowers (such as roses, which Svishchenko views as likely being influenced by Rosicrucian Symbolism wherein "the rose symbolizes the divine light of the Universe"), as well as more abstracted, "otherworldly", prismatic patterns. This vision is enhanced by the vibrant colors used throughout the work, with deep jewel-like reds, greens, and blues dominating. Maus argues that while Filonov's transformation of the Holy Family is "consistent with the long-standing anachronistic depiction of Biblical events [...] it also demonstrates a sympathy with the more revolutionary social mode of thought of the time". Here Maus refers to the national empathy for "the plight of the Russian peasantry", and that Filonov's painting amounted to a "visual allegory" that glorified, and perhaps even deified, the peasant family. He concludes, "The extreme state control of both art (officialization of Socialist Realism) and agriculture (collectivization) within a decade of the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War would have made it almost impossible for Filonov to produce this same painting ten years later, but the political climate in 1914 was still open to such moderately radical interpretations of 'bourgeois' styles and themes".
Oil on canvas - Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
Flowers of Universal Blooming (Tsvety mirovogo rastsveta)
Flowers of Universal Blooming (or Flowers of Universal Flowering) is one of Filonov's best-known works. The painting features a kaleidoscope of colored fragments, with variations in shading, collectively creating a loose form of human figuration (two elongated bodies separated by a human face), as well as flowers, and perhaps other loosely defined organic forms. Artist and arts writer Jim Lane notes that "The meanings of Filonov's works remain a mystery for the spectators because they were ingeniously encrypted. He often depicted man-made things and natural things, synthesizing them with people, and animals. ... His method was to break up the visible world into individual elements and then recreate them into complex images full of hidden symbolic meaning. He enciphered, a mystical picture of the world, so as to extend the possibilities of representational art making the invisible visible".
Historian and curator Evgenii Kovtun goes further in his analysis. He describes how Filonov "strives to imitate not the forms which nature creates but the methods by which it 'operates.' This is the organic path in artistic creation [that] grows like a living organism". Kovtun draws our attention, too, to Filonov's idea of "units of action" ("edinitsy deistviia") which "are the indivisible particles, the color-imbued 'atoms' which make up the infrastructure of his paintings [and] renders them by invented form, that is, non-objectively". Kovtun sees broad similarities between Filonov and the "non-objective" styles of Malevich and Mondrian. However, Filonov's paintings are able to simultaneously encompass the abstract and the figurative. As he says, "When Malevich or Mondrian paint a non-objective canvas, there is nothing figurative in it, whereas a Filonov painting may 'begin' as a figurative one and 'continue' as a pure abstraction. Or a lengthy non-objective 'overture' may usher in a figurative image".
Oil on canvas - Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
Formula of Spring
Filonov's pure abstractions were rare but included early works such as Formula of the Cosmos (1918-19), Victory over Eternity (1921), and later, Formula of Spring. Historians such as Jean-Paul Martinon have suggested that the earlier abstractions owed a debt to Cubo-Futurism. He argues, for instance, that Victory over Eternity, while defying any sort of literal reading, its "complex vortex of small cubes and triangles" might hint at a landscape or a portrait, even though "the geometrical shapes [that] saturate the picture plane, leaving no space for distance or perspective". Formula of Spring, on the other hand, "has no specific compositional structure, except for a simple movement from detail to detail and from the particular to the general until all the canvas is filled".
Formula of Spring is emblematic of Filonov's philosophy of "Analytical Realism". It relates to his belief that a painting should, like nature, grow as it makes its way organically across the height and width of the canvas (or other surface). Here the artist used a fine brush and worked his way carefully over the surface of the canvas, deliberately and intentionally placing each point of color as he went. As he instructed his students, "Paint every atom with precision, meticulously inject colour into each atom you work on, let it sink in, as heat sinks into a body, let it be organically connected with the form, as the cells of a plant with a flower". Kovtun goes so far as to call this piece "the crowning achievement of [Filonov's] painting", adding that there are no "flowering trees here or landscape background; instead, the artist produces a powerful sensation of the vernal exultation of nature, of its living 'organics,' via pure color, breaches of deep blue, an unceasing movement of microstructures, and the capricious rhythm of large forms. This painting is not a state but a process comparable to a biological one".
Oil on canvas - Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
Portrait of Joseph Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili)
Although Filonov is associated chiefly with a unique avant-garde style, he occasionally ventured into a more traditional figurative mode. This was most evident in his portraiture. One such portrait, from later in his career, was of the Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. The communist policies that Stalin implemented led to severe famines and political violence, both of which resulted in the deaths of millions of citizens. It is curious, then, that the artist produced a portrait of Stalin, and such a striking one at that, with his expression intense and piercing, and his skin appearing to glow, much like the blue-green background behind him. Art historian and curator Julia Tatiana Bailey explains that the portrait was produced in 1936 during "the period now known as the Great Terror or Great Purge was just getting started". Over the following three years, Stalin "purged" (killed, tortured, and/or imprisoned) the Soviet Union of his political rivals, intellectuals, artists, and dissenters who posed any real or imagined threat to his total rule.
Baily states, "With little evidence to the contrary, Filonov's portrait has been explained as an unsuccessful attempt to curry favour with Stalin's regime by producing an official portrait of the ruler". Indeed, his choice of Stalin as subject matter implies a level of compliance given that Filonov's views on absolute creative freedom were entrenched and Stalin's administration mandated an Social Realist art. However, on closer analysis the portrait might be hinting at something more subversive, and possibly even autobiographical. As Bailey explains, "this haunting image, where Stalin appears to emerge out of the darkness, his eyes empty, black holes, his cold, hard stare unflinching and merciless, his face appearing more like a death mask than living flesh [suggests] Filonov's feelings of helplessness and inevitable tragedy in the face of the unforgiving Stalinist machine".
Oil on canvas - Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
Countenances (Faces on an Icon)
One of Filonov's last works, Countenances is a finely detailed, semi-abstracted image, in which two sets of eyes peer out at the viewer from a dense web of interconnected colored dots, lines, and shapes. The web is reminiscent of the neural network of the human brain, suggesting, perhaps, that the artist wants us to search for his figures' souls. Maus writes, "Much of Filonov's painting, especially his more abstract work, is derived from pointillism in that it uses a collection of smaller formal elements to create a larger work". Maus adds, however, that Filonov chooses not to "limit himself solely to dots of color as the constituent parts of his paintings. Rather, the formal elements that make up his 'dots' also include individual images (faces, buildings, bodies), geometric shapes, areas of texture and body parts. Also, he does not necessarily use the smaller formal parts to create a recognizable whole in the manner of the pointillist Georges Seurat".
Filonov believed that his paintings were the results (the proof, indeed) that his theory of Analytical Realism could see art reach a new cerebral horizon. This, in turn, would lead to profound psychological/spiritual experiences for his viewer. Maus adds, "Filonov's choices in level of fragmentation, color, precision of depiction and contrast all add a metaphorical weight to the painting that acquires richness because of its conscious demand that the viewer notice and contemplate the reasons behind the deformations - ie. to decipher the 'struggle for development of a higher intellectual plane'". Filonov himself stated that he had replaced "the complicated notion of 'creativity' with the word 'completeness' [which] means that an artist should give all his will and effort to his work". Filonov died of starvation (as condition only exacerbated by the terrible Siege of Leningrad) shortly after this painting was produced. In light these tragic circumstances, the work stands as testimony to an artist of unswerving personal conviction who showed that, where circumstances dictate, one should be prepared to die for one's art.
Oil on paper - Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
Biography of Pavel Filonov
Childhood
Pavel Filonov was the youngest of six children born to a coachman and a part-time laundress. His father died when Pavel was four years old; his mother when he was thirteen. Parental responsibilities then passed to his beloved eldest sister. As the family was extremely poor, Pavel had to work from a young age, helping his sisters embroider towels which they sold at the local market. When Filonov was fourteen, his sister married a prosperous engineer and the family relocated from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Art critic Robert Chandler notes, however, that Filonov was "dismayed by their new bourgeois comfort" and chose to sleep on the floor and earned his own money by taking odd jobs house painting.
Education and Early Career
Filonov's siblings recognized his innate talent for painting and encouraged him to study art. He first joined a decoration and drawing course at the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, and worked as one of a team of students on the decoration of the estate of Princess Oldenburg in Ramon. Between 1903 and 1908, Filonov studied at the private studio of illustrator Lev Dmitriev-Kavkazski. Both talented and entrepreneurial, he earned a good living (while still a student) painting houses, retouching photographs, and making posters, and product wrappers. His income allowed him to visit France, Italy, Austria, Kazan, Caucasus, and Jerusalem. Filonov produced scores of sketches on his travels but, as art historian John Ellis Bowlt notes, these did nothing to reveal the details of "exactly where he went and when [and] what he saw and did in each place".
In 1908, on his fourth attempt, Filonov was accepted into the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, largely on the strength of his exceptional knowledge of human anatomy. Unfortunately, his reputation for being an expert at anatomical accuracy (he would boast to colleagues that he knew the "Latin name of every muscle and every nervous process") also went against the strict conservative standards of the Academy. Art historian Alena Esaulova recounts, for instance, how "[when] Filonov portrayed the human figure so that his veins and muscles were visible [...] the teacher was indignant". Filonov was then expelled in his second year "for influencing comrades by the lewdness of his work", for not listening to his teachers, and (so it was rumored) for refusing to bow to an important princess who was a patron of the Academy.
Mature Career
From around 1910 Filonov kept company with artists such as Kazimir Malevich and took part in projects and exhibitions linked to the burgeoning avant-garde. Around this time he also became associated with the Union of Youth (Soyuz Molodyozhi) arts group. Led by artists Elena Guro and Mikhail Matyushin, he exhibited works from his Head series with the group. Reviews of the exhibition were mixed. One critic, Vasily Yan, was scathing of most of the pieces, but reserved special praise for Filonov's paintings' "beautiful and harmonious line and strange oriental fantasticality". Art critic Nikolay Breshko-Breshkovsky said of one Filonov's Heads that it was a "precious psychiatric document, probably suggesting that its author was insane". Filonov also became involved with Futurist artists and writers Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burlyuk, and Velimir Khlebnikov, with who he worked on scenery and costume design, and illustrations for poetry collections (although many of these were censored for being "pornographic").
In 1912, Filonov published his essay, "The Canon and the Law" (1912), in which he first introduced his concept on "Analytical Realism" (or "Universal Flowering"). Art critic Rober Chandler writes, "Filonov attacked Picasso - not for being outrageously innovative, but for creating a new academicism [and that] Cubism had reached a dead-end because of its mechanistic fundamentals". Two years later (following the demise of the Union of Youth) he produced what is loosely considered his manifesto, "Made Paintings" ("Sdelannye Kartiny"). But although Filonov had claimed to have moved away from the stylistic influences of other avant-garde movements (such as Cubism, Cubo-Futurism, and Expressionism), English professor Derek C. Maus notes, that his style still introduced "elements of traditional painting [...] many of which are at least conversant with, if not derived from, other Modernist schools". He drew, for instance, on traditional sources such as lubok (Russian popular prints featuring traditional Russian folk and religious stories and characters), from which he took "inverted perspective, flat rendition of figures, distinct vulgarization of form, outline by color rather than line".
In the autumn of 1916, Filonov enlisted in the Russian army and fought on the Romanian front. The following year he joined the Russian Revolution and served as the Chairman of the Revolutionary War Committee of Dunay (a small area in the Gulf of Peter the Great). After his service, Filonov returned to Petrograd (formally St Petersburg). In 1919, he exhibited in the First Free Exhibit of Artists of All Trends at the Hermitage Gallery. Two years later, Filonov met his future wife, Ekaterina Serebryakova, after she had asked him to paint a portrait of her late husband. Filonov's letters confirm his deep love and adoration for Ekaterina (a woman 21 years his senior).
Late Period and Death
From 1923 (having made his peace with the institution), Filonov worked as a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts. In the same year he became a member of the Institute for Artistic Culture (INKhUK). In 1925 Filonov had established his own school, Masters of Analytical Art (Mastera Analiticheskogo Iskusstva, or known more generally as MAI). Russian art historian Galina Yelshevskaya writes, "The 'Masters' had no special manifesto, using Filonov's previous texts as their guide, including his Made Paintings, 1914 and the Declaration of Universal Flowering of 1923". In the latter Filonov wrote, "I categorically denounce as unscientific the dogma of contemporary Realism of 'two predicates' with all of its right- and left-winged followers. In its place I propose a scientific, analytical and intuitive naturalism: the observer's acknowledgment of all of the object's predicates, all the parameters of its entire world, and also the characteristics of human processes, both seen and unseen by the naked eye". As Historian and curator Evgenii Kovtun explains, Filonov "renders the invisible not through the visible, as the Realists and Cubists do, but through novel plastic solutions. [This] is what makes him unique; no wonder that [the Russian poet and theorist Aleksei] Kruchenykh called him the 'eyewitness of the invisible'".
In 1929 a young American artist, Helena Huntington-Hooker, joined the MAI. Ekaterina became convinced that the two had begun a romantic relationship, and was driven so mad by jealousy, she spent some time in a sanatorium. She wrote her husband a letter offering to separate, but, alarmed and distressed by her offer, he pledged his love to her. In 1929, a large retrospective of Filonov's work was planned at the Russian Museum. However, the Soviet government prohibited the event, and the Leningrad Union of Artists launched a campaign to "exterminate Filonov's artworks". Indeed, under Stalin's regime, Filonov had come to be labelled as a "madman", a "hypnotist", "a Formalist", and an "enemy of Proletarian Art". At one point, he even conceded to pressures to paint in the accepted Social Realist style, but these efforts were not well-received. A near destitute Filonov went through the 1930s producing very little work and refusing to sell his art to individual patrons (still hoping to donate all his work to the Russian Museum), nor accepting payment for his teaching.
Filonov's later life was marked by tragedy. Two of his stepsons were shot in 1938 and Ekaterina suffered a stroke in the street the following year. He devoted the next three years of his life to her care. Filonov died a few months before his wife, on December 3, 1941, one of millions to starve to death during the Nazi Siege of Leningrad. Esaulova explains that "Filonov was one of the first victims of the blockade - his body had not been given enough food throughout his whole life, therefore, there were no reserves to hold out. Having made sure that he did everything he could in terms of his wife's health, he then guarded the paintings. Filonov spent all nights in the attic, fearing that a random shell could damage his artworks".
After his death, Filonov's sister, Yevdokiya Nikolayevna Glebova, placed about 400 of his paintings in storage, and later, in 1960, gifted them to the State Russian Museum in accordance with her late brother's wishes. However, the exhibition of his work was still forbidden. In 1967 an exhibition of his work was permitted in Novosibirsk, and finally, at the Russian Museum in 1988. His works were first shown in the West, in Paris, a year later. An international symposium, "A Chant of Universal Flowering: The Poetry and Painting of Pavel Filonov", organized by the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles, and sponsored by the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, followed in 2005.
The Legacy of Pavel Filonov
Although little known outside of Russia, Pavel Filonov was a key figure in the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Indeed, arts editor Brian Droitcour calls him "the greatest Russian avant-garde artist that no one has ever heard of". As historian John E. Bowlt notes, "the polyphonic philosophy of his work is perhaps more in tune with the Russian mentality [and for this reason] has proved of greater interest to Russian, rather than to Western, specialists". For his part, Filonov considered himself a true patriot who wanted his collective works to be owned by the Russian people (rather than commodities to be haggled over by dealers and collectors).
Filonov's art has invited comparisons with the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, and Vladimir Tatlin. But his theory of Analytical Realism was a unique approach amongst those artists seeking to search beyond the "surface of things". As art historian Evgenii Kovtun writes, "The cardinal difference between Filonov and the artists of the avant-garde surrounding him lies in his aspiration to make visible what is in principle invisible. He wanted to expand the possibilities of representational art by adding the invisible (yet supremely important) elements of nature, society, and man's spiritual world to the ranks of images". Art critic Brian Droitcour concludes, "No matter their temperament, Filonov's works always boast complex and dazzling textures. He may be art history's most brilliant doodler, with repetitive geometric patterns and haphazardly arranged figures of varying scale [...] that grow from his stream-of-consciousness technique. Filonov's obsessive detail work and the worm-eaten complexion of his subjects have led to comparisons to Ivan Albright, but the chaos and spontaneity of his structure and color schemes make him a unique phenomenon and yield rich material for future exhibition and study".