Pavel Filonov: biography of the artist

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Filonov Pavel Nikolayevich - an outstanding Russian painter, graphic artist, poet, art theorist. Born into a poor family in Moscow in 1883. Since childhood, he had to face difficulties and hardships. Orphaned at an early age, he earned his living by retouching photographs, embroidering tablecloths and napkins, painting posters and packaging for goods. The boy's talent for drawing appeared already at the age of three or four.

In 1897 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he began to take painting lessons. In 1908, at the age of 25, Filonov entered the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, but was expelled from it in 1910, because he risked rebelling against the dictates of the academy professors, who imposed classical standards on their students. From that time on, he tried to establish himself as an independent artist, intolerant of conventional aesthetic traditions. In truth, Pavel Filonov opposed both classical realism and the avant-garde of the beginning of the century, namely cubism andfuturism. Indignant at the geometric and mechanical principles of such art, he believed that representatives of these movements interpret nature too simply, focusing on only two of its aspects: color and form.

Being practically self-taught, a man of considerable intellectual ability, the artist never sold his paintings and did not write anything to order. Pavel Filonov took private drawing lessons from Lev Evgrafovich Dmitriev-Kavkazsky, a copper engraver, etcher and draftsman, visiting his “Student Workshop”. In 1911, the artist goes on a pilgrimage. For six months he travels on foot in Russia, the Middle East, Italy and France. To pay for food and shelter, he painted the walls in the houses where he found shelter.

During World War I, Pavel Filonov fought on the Romanian front. Unconditionally accepted the October Revolution, was elected chairman of the executive council of the Danube region. Returning to Petrograd, he founded a painting studio, which created scenery for a number of theatrical performances, illustrations for the Finnish epic Kalevala.

Two works written in 1910 anticipated the development of the artist's analytical method. These are the "Peasant Family" and "Heads", because of which Pavel Filonov was expelled from the Academy. Contemporaries did not understand them.

"World Bloom" is the name given by the artist to his own system of analytical art, which is the result of cubo-futuristic experiments undertaken by him in1913-1915. It is characterized by a very detailed and multifaceted method - the picture is created from a point to a general image (“like a germinating grain”) with the thinnest of brushes and a sharp pencil on a relatively flat surface. Images have multiple points of view (as in cubism), but are also based on the principle of simultaneity, characteristic of futurism. The philosophy of the artist was outlined in the work "Flowers of the World Bloom" in 1915. Then it was revised and published in the form of a "Declaration" in 1923, when Pavel Nikolayevich Filonov was appointed teacher at the Petrograd Academy of Arts. The Ideology of Analytical Art was published in 1930.

Despite the fact that his incredible talent was recognized in the 1920s, the artist later did not find understanding with the critics. His exposition in the Russian Museum was actually banned, and his students and friends left him. Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova emigrated, Velimir Khlebnikov died. He himself did not try to do anything to find some way out, because he was intolerant of any compromise. Refused to participate in exhibitions in Paris, Dresden, Venice, USA. Filonov wanted his works to be first seen at home, he dreamed of creating a museum of analytical art. Three times he turned down an offer to take a professorship at the Academy of Arts, explaining his decision by the fact that he was afraid of inconsistency with his position. In the 1930s, the situation in life changed for the worse. But despite the plight, he continued his creative search. However, hungerand the cold won. On December 3, 1941, at the very beginning of the siege of Leningrad, Pavel Filonov was found dead in his apartment.