Pavel Filonov was a Russian painter and an art theorist of the first half of the 20th century who represented Russian avant-garde and futurism.
Background
Ethnicity:
Pavel Filonov’s parents came from a Russian city Ryazan, Ryazan Oblast.
Pavel Filonov was born on January 8, 1883, in Moscow, Russian Empire (currently Russian Federation) to a large family of the coachman Nikolai Ivanovich and a laundress Lyubov Nikolaevna. The artist’s father received the surname ‘Filonov’ only after his settlement in Moscow in 1880.
Since the age of 5 years till eleven, Pavel had performed as a corps de ballet dancer in various local theatres.
His abilities to painting and the love for details he revealed in early childhood as well. His earliest surviving drawing, ‘Moscow yard’, dated to 1894.
After the death of his father, he supported his mother by retouching photos, cross-stitching tablecloths and selling them.
Filonov’s mother died in 1896 of tuberculosis. A year later, the family relocated to Saint Petersburg where the artist’s elder sister Alexandra lived.
Education
Pavel Filonov entered the Moscow parochial school in 1894 and finished it with honours three years later.
Later, while in Saint Petersburg, his elder sister Alexandra and her husband, Alexandr Nikolaevich Gue, a prosperous merchant, noticed Pavel’s drawing abilities and enrolled him at the painting workshops in Saint Petersburg where he had developed his artistic skills till 1901.
The young artist combined the studies with the art classes at the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (existed till 1929) which he had attended since 1898.
Five years later, he became a student at the private studio of the Lev Evgrafovich Dmitriev-Kavkazsky. Filonov spent five years there.
To explore the European and Antique art, Pavel Filonov travelled to France, Italy, around the Volga River and Caucasus regions, visited Jerusalem, using the money he had received for one of his paintings called 'Heads' in 1913.
After, he tried to enter the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts three times but was accepted only as an irregular student in 1908. In a couple of years, he left the institution because of his dissatisfaction with the formal approach of teaching with the domination of the academic painting.
Pavel Filonov had worked as a house painter at the beginning of his career.
As to the career of an artist, it was related to the art group called Soyuz Molodyozhi (Union of the Youth) which he joined in 1910. The young artist had presented his early artworks at the exhibitions organized by the association and contributed to its magazine till the dissolution of the group in 1914.
The principles of the analytical realism were formulated by Filonov for the first time in his essay ‘Canon and the Law’ of 1912. The article became a sort of the ‘anti-Cubism’ manifest.
The following year, the painter tried his hand as a set decorator for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s drama titled ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky’. It was the same period when Filonov befriended other Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov whose poetry collection called ‘Selected Poems with Postscript, 1907–1914’ he illustrated in collaboration with Kazimir Malevich. A year later, Filonov published his own poem called ‘Sermon on the World Underwood’ (‘Propoved o porosly mirovoy’). The artist continued to work on the ‘Ideology of the analytical realism’.
Then, Pavel Filonov took part at the First World War by serving as sea soldier on the Romanian front from 1916 till 1918. During the Revolution of 1917, he chaired the Revolutionary War Committee of Dunay region but soon returned to the painting activity.
In a couple of years, Filonov presented his artworks at the First Free Exhibition of Artists of All Trends at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The same year, with the help of the painter Paul Mansouroff who occupied the post of the custodian of the Writer’s Center in Saint Petersburg, Pavel Filonov received a big room in the city’s outskirts which served him as a studio till the end of his days.
At the beginning of 1923, the artist became a professor of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts where he unsuccessfully tried to reorganize the painting and sculpture departments. Filonov read some lectures on the analytical realism. Later, all the ideas of the concept where gathered in the writing called the ‘Declaration of the Universal Flowering’ published in the art magazine ‘Zhizn iskusstva’ (‘The life of Art’).
In a couple of years, Pavel Filonov established his art school called ‘Collective of Masters of Analytical Art’ which gathered about seventy students at different times. The workshop was very popular among the young painters, including the foreign ones.
The popularity of the art style which did not correspond to the common soviet ideology irritated Soviet cultural authorities which accused the artist in formalism and declared him ‘mad enemy of the working class’. Since then, Filonov had been persecuted and ostracized by the authorities. The exhibition of his artworks planned in 1929 at the State Russian Museum was postponed three times and finally completely forbidden by the Soviet government.
During the Siege of Leningrad, Pavel Filonov starving didn’t leave his apartment studio and protected his canvases from destruction till his death.
Achievements
Pavel Filonov was a distinguished painter and one of the most remarkable representatives of the avant-garde movement.
He developed the unique concept of analytical realism who later had a great impact on the multiple artists and writers and contributed to the further evolution of the Russian avant-garde.
Bad treated by the authorities almost all his life and forbidden for a long time after his death, Filonov’s art was rediscovered only in the late sixties.
The first personal exhibition of his artworks took place on August 18, 1967, at the Art Gallery of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Novosibirsk. This one was followed by the retrospective at the Leningrad division of the Union of Artists (currently the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists). The State Russian Museum organized a huge retrospective of Filonov’s art in 1988.
At the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990, eight Filonov’s paintings which have been illegally exported abroad were exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Seven canvases were given back to the Russian Museum.
Other exhibitions deducted to the art of Pavel Filonov include the presentations in Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russian Federation in 1994, the retrospective at the State Russian Museum called ‘Pavel Filonov. The seer of invisible’ in 2006 and the same show at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts the following year.
The majority of Pavel Filonov’s heritage estimated to about three hundred paintings and graphic drawings is preserved at the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. Some of his canvases can also be found in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russian Federation.
In 2006, Filonov’s painting called ‘The Adoration of the Magi’ was purchased at Christie's in London for $1,761,794.
Portrait of Evdokiya Nikolaevna Glebova, the Artist's Sister
Saint Catherine
Eleven Heads
The Head
Girl with a Flower
Udarnitzi (Record Breaking Workers) at the Factory Krasnaya Zaria
Oxen. Scene from the Life of Wanderers
The Gardener
Portrait of Joseph Stalin
Mother
Head
Execution
After the Raid
Heads
Ships
Untitled (Non-objective Composition)
The Three at the Table
Untitled (The Riders)
Portrait of Arman Frantsevich Aziber and his Son
Faces
Animals
Yard Keepers (Dvorniki)
Formula of the Revolution
East and West
Mardi Gras (Maslenitsa)
Magi
People
Easter
Narva Triumphal Arch
The Сoachmen
Formula of the Cosmos
Faces
The Kolkhoznik (Collective Farmer)
A Family Portrait
Composition
Flowers
A Couple
Beast (Wolf Cub)
Formula of the Universe
Landscape. Wind
Rebirth of the People
Pedagogics
Untitled (Three Figures)
Defeater of the City
Composition (A Raid)
A Peasant Family (The Holy Family)
The February Revolution
Head
Composition
Formula of the Universe
Hunger
The Workers
Colonial Policy
Peasant Family
Victory over Eternity
Head
A White Picture
Man and Woman (Adam and Eve)
Formula of Spring
Kings' Feast
Milkmaids
Houses
Flight to Egypt
Goat
Bourgeois in a Carriage
Feast of Kings
Landscape with Two Animals
GOELRO (Lenin's Plan for the Electrification of Russia)
Self-portrait
War with Germany
Self-portrait
Animals
Head
Horsemen
October. Landscape. Formula
Workers
Universal Flowering
Execution (after 1905)
Head
Untitled (Saint George the Victorious)
Heads
Raider (Mugger)
Two Men
Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat
Musicians
Horses
Worker in a Cap
At the Table
West and East
A French Worker
A Small House in Moscow
Shostakovich's First Symphony
Fishing Schooner
A Man in the World
Views
Pavel Filonov believed that every object has its inner soul which had to be shown by the artist instead of the form and colour. According to his artistic philosophy, the painter should depict the objects from the particular to the general, from the smaller details called by him ‘atoms’ to the bigger ones. The paintings should grow gradually like all living things do.
Quotations:
“The most precious thing in every painting or drawing is the powerful work of the human on the object; in that work, he reveals himself and his immortal soul.”
“Every object has not only form and colour, it is composed of a whole world of the visible and invisible phenomena, the known or secret properties.”
"For twenty-five years, I have seated with my back to the window and painted."
Membership
Union of the Youth
,
Soviet Union
1910 - 1914
Personality
Pavel Filonov was an uncompromising and obstinate person whose pride didn't allow him to accept the old-age pension from the state. He wanted to be recognized only as a painter.
He was an obsessed artist and devoted all his time to painting.
The painter read a lot of different literature, from the writings of Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin to the books of Karl Marks and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
Filonov almost never took money for the rare commissioned paintings nor from the students to whom he taught art although he lived in extreme poverty. All the money he borrowed from his wife, the artist gave back to her.
Pavel Filonov didn’t want his canvases to be sold to private collectors and rejected all the propositions to immigrate abroad where his paintings were more estimated than in the Soviet Union. Filonov desired to leave all his artworks in his homeland and to found the museum of the Analytical Realism. He named himself “a labourer from art”.
To protect his paintings from destruction during the Siege of Leningrad, Pavel Filonov stood at the attic of the building where he lived and dropped down the firebombs.
The artist’s will was partly done after his death – the canvases preserved by one of his sisters Yevdokiya Nikolaevna Glebova were gifted to the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg in the 1970s.
Physical Characteristics:
Pavel Filonov was a tall thin person with a cherry colour of eyes. He could look at the sun for a long time without blinking.
Quotes from others about the person
"A troublemaker of the canvas", "a seer of invisible" Aleksei Kruchenykh, a Russian futurist poet
"A voice of the urban misery" Velimir Khlebnikov, a Russian futurist poet
Connections
Pavel Filonov met his future wife Ekaterina Alexandrovna Serebryakova in 1921 when she commissioned him a posthumous portrait of her husband.
Pavel and Ekaterina married three years later. Ekaterina Alexandrovna was fifty-eight years old and Pavel Filonov was younger for twenty years.
The artist called his spouse a ‘daughter’.
Filonov had two stepsons, Ekaterina Alexandrovna’s children from the previous marriage. Their names were Anatoly Esperovich Serebryakov and Peter Esperovich Serebryakov. Both were purged and shot in 1938.
