Pavel Filonov
1883-1941
Artist Pavel Filonov, and the movement he founded, Analytical Art, are entirely unique to Russia.
Born into poverty in Ryazan, Filonov moved with his family to St Petersburg in 1897, where he began his artistic education. He attempted three times to enter the Imperial Academy of Arts before he was accepted at a school attached to the academy. Leaving the school in 1910, he immediately entered the ‘Union of Youth’ group with Matyushin and Elena Guro, remaining a member until the group’s disbandment in 1914. By this stage Filonov was already developing his unique style, painting the grotesque with exceptional attention to detail, hence the term ‘analytic’, which was first used to describe the work in a 1912 article, ‘The Canon and the Law’.
At the beginning of the 1910s Filonov began his friendship with the Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, a perfect foil for the wild and other-worldly fantasies they shared. In 1914 the only actual manifesto of Analytical Art urged its adherents to ‘Paint every atom, with exactitude and perseverance. Into colour, place the same’. With its vast swirling mosaics of colour, each detail painted to the nth degree, Filonov’s art defies categorisation. The infinitely complex ‘Formula of Spring’ and ‘Universal Flowering’ are quite unlike anything else in the canon of world art.
After serving in the First World War, Filonov took an active part in the Revolution, and in the early 1920s attempted unsuccessfully to bring the teaching methods of the Academy of Arts more in line with Analytical Art. But his failed attempt resulted in ‘The Declaration of a World Dawn’, in which Filonov stated that there was a whole world of invisible things, unseen to the human eye but accessible to ‘the knowing eye’ – his intuition and knowledge. The declaration led in turn to the formation of an entire school of Analytical Art and Artists, whose brief flowering marked a high-water mark for experimentation in Soviet art.
In the 1930s, Filonov was cast as a formalist and enemy of proletarian art. Even a portrait of Stalin failed to silence his critics, and his group was subject to the most intense and heartless attacks. Filonov himself chose to starve, teaching free of charge, painting on paper instead of canvas. His life marked by tragedy – two of his stepsons were shot in 1938 – Filonov died, broken, in the early months of the siege of Leningrad.
