Formula of the universe description of the picture. Artist Pavel Filonov

Self-portrait

The art of Pavel Filonov (1883-1941) was one of the brightest pages in Russian fine art of the first third of the twentieth century. It contained a largely new philosophical sense of reality, as well as an original artistic method, not fully appreciated by either contemporaries or art historians of subsequent decades. The figure of Filonov in all its magnitude became natural for its era. The master's dramatic creative concept took shape on the eve of the First World War, and his main artistic techniques arose and were developed in polemics with the masters of the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century, especially cubism and futurism.

Pavel Nikolaevich was born in Moscow on December 27, 1882 according to Art. style, that is, January 8, 1883 - in a new way, but Filonov’s parents, as he himself writes, are “philistines of Ryazan”; all numerous family members were listed in the tax books and family lists of the Ryazan petty bourgeois council until 1917.

Father - Nikolai Ivanov, a peasant in the village of Renevka, Efremovsky district, Tula province, until August 1880 - “without a family”; Presumably, the surname “Filonov” was assigned to him when his family moved to Moscow. P. Filonov indicates that his father worked as a coachman and cab driver. About his mother, Lyubov Nikolaevna, he only reports that she took the laundry to wash. It has not been established where the Filonovs lived in Moscow - whether in the city house of the Golovins, or whether they served with them, or whether they had their own business...

1894−1897 - student of the city (“Karetnoryadnaya”) parish school (Moscow), which he graduated with honors; a year before, his mother died of consumption.

After moving to St. Petersburg in 1897, Filonov entered painting and painting workshops and upon graduation worked “in the painting and painting business.” In parallel, from 1898 he attended evening drawing classes of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, and from 1903 he studied in the private workshop of academician L. E. Dmitriev-Kavkazsky (1849-1916).
In 1905-1907 Filonov traveled along the Volga, Caucasus, and visited Jerusalem.

Landscape.Wind 1907

Mages (sages)

Icon of St. Catherine 1908-10

Flight to Egypt 1918

In 1908-1910, Filonov tried to complete his professional training as a volunteer student at the Higher Art School at the Academy of Arts (among his teachers were G. Myasoedov and Y. Tsionglinsky). But a fundamental difference with the academic professors in understanding the tasks and method of creativity prompted him to leave the school and begin an independent path as an artist.

Heads 1910

Maslenitsa 1912-1914
The pre-revolutionary period of Filonov's work was very fruitful: from the end of 1910, the young artist became one of the leading figures in the Youth Union association, which included representatives of the artistic avant-garde of St. Petersburg and Moscow. In 1913, the Gileya group of writers - poets - joined the Union. futurists V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, A. Kruchenykh, V. Kamensky, D. and N. Burliuk and others. Filonov participated in the work on the scenery for the tragedy “Vladimir Mayakovsky” (1913), created drawings for the poems of V. Khlebnikov (1914) and wrote the poem “Sermon on the Sprouting of the World” (1915) with his own illustrations. In the pre-revolutionary period, the main intonation of Filonov’s art was determined, reflecting his rejection of the grimaces of civilization, and a premonition of negative social cataclysms.

Those who have nothing to lose

Milkmaids 1914

Ships 1915

During these same years, Filonov created such program films as “The Feast of Kings”, “Man and Woman”, “West and East” (all 1912-1913), “Peasant Family” (1914), “German War” (1915) .

West and East 1911,12-13.

Feast of Kings 1913
The painting “The Feast of Kings” was created a year before the start of the First World War, and contemporaries perceived it as a kind of prophecy, a vision of the Apocalypse.
The corpses of the rulers of the modern world sitting at the table are a metaphor for the end, decay, and dying of the old world. The poet Velimir Khlebnikov immediately caught the disturbing sound of the picture and expressed it in the lines: “a feast of corpses, a feast of revenge.” The dead ate vegetables majestically and importantly, illuminated like the ray of the moon by the frenzy of grief.”
Researchers of Filonov’s work often made comparisons with “Herod’s Feast,” and one of the artist’s students called “The Feast of Kings” a demonic reworking of “The Last Supper.”
The images created by Filonov’s brush are emphatically grotesque. Permeated with a red-blue stained-glass glow of colors, with the crooked figure of a seated slave reminiscent of the chimera of a Gothic cathedral, this work most clearly reflects Filonov's fascination with the French Middle Ages.

Man and woman 1912

Peasant family 1914
or from another angle

Holy Family 1914

Three people at a table 1914

Cabbies 1915

War with Germany 1915

St. George the Winner 1915

In the fall of 1916, he was mobilized for war and sent to the Romanian Front as a private in the 2nd Regiment of the Baltic Naval Division. Pavel Filonov takes an active part in the revolution and holds the position of chairman of the Executive Military Revolutionary Committee of the Danube region in Izmail, etc.

In 1918 he returned to Petrograd and took part in the First Free Exhibition of works by artists of all directions - a grandiose exhibition in the Winter Palace. Viktor Shklovsky greets the artist, noting “the enormous scope and pathos of the great master.” The exhibition featured works from the series “Entering World Heyday.” Two works: “Mother”, 1916 and “Winner of the City”, 1914-1915. (both mixed media on cardboard or paper) were donated by Filonov to the state.

Mother 1916

City Winner 1903

Workers 1916

Officers 1916-17

They were preceded by a theoretical article “Canon and Law” (1912), in which Filonov outlined the principles of his analytical art. In a dispute with P. Picasso and the Cubo-Futurists, Filonov put forward the idea of ​​the “atomic structure of the Universe,” felt in all its aspects, particulars, external and internal processes. “I know, analyze, see, intuit that in any object there are not two predicates, form and color, but a whole world of visible or invisible phenomena, their emanations, reactions, inclusions, genesis, being,” he wrote. This main conclusion was followed by the rest: the artist should imitate not the forms of nature, but the methods; with the help of which the latter “acts,” to convey its inner life “in an inventive form,” that is, without object, to contrast the eye that simply sees with the “knowing eye,” the true one. In these theses, Filonov opposed not only Picasso, but also his compatriots - V. Tatlin, K. Malevich, Z. Lissitzky.

Rebirth of Man 1918

Bulls. Scene from rural life 1918

In the first half of the 1920s, Filonov once again formulated his views on art in the “Declaration of World Prosperity” (1923) and confirmed them in a number of programmatic paintings: “The Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat” (1921), “The Living Head” (1923), “ Animals" (1925-1926). “Think persistently and precisely about every atom of the thing you are doing,” he wrote in “The Ideology of Analytical Art.” “...Persistently and accurately introduce the color being worked on into each atom, so that it is absorbed there, like heat into the body, or organically connected with the form, like the fiber of a flower with color in nature.”

Revolution formula 1920

Last supper 1920

Formula of the Petrograd proletariat 1921

In 1922 he donated two works to the Russian Museum (including “The Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat”, 1920-1921 - oil on canvas, 154 × 117 cm).
Filonov's attempt to reorganize the painting and sculpture departments of the Academy of Arts in Petrograd dates back to 1922 - unsuccessful; Filonov's ideas do not find official support. But Filonov gave a series of lectures on the theory and “ideology” of analytical art. The end result was the Declaration of World Flourishing, the most important document of analytical art. Filonov insists there that, in addition to form and color, there is a whole world of invisible phenomena that the “seeing eye” does not see, but is comprehended by the “knowing eye”, with its intuition and knowledge. The artist represents these phenomena in an “invented form,” that is, without an object.

Living head 1923

Living head 1923

With this approach, the categories of space and time in the master’s paintings received an unusually complex interpretation. One of Filonov’s best paintings, “Formula of Spring” (1929), resulted in a kind of symphony of polished, “made” touches and “sounds”, into a chorale of cosmogonic sound seething with the boiling of life.

Spring formula

White painting from the series "Worldwide Bloom"

Formula of the Universe

Since the mid-1920s, Filonov again turned out to be a tragic seer - of Soviet reality at the end of the 1920-1930s. In these aspects, his art could be correlated with expressionism (S. Munch, M. Backman); in Russian culture, M. Vrubel, V. Ciurlionis, A. Scriabin, A. Bely, V. Khlebnikov remained close to Filonov.

Pedagogy 1923

Heads 1924
The artist’s attempt to visually recreate a world parallel to nature, that is, to escape from reality into something invented, abstract, despite Filonov’s revolutionary proletarian phraseology, becomes a dangerous utopia. Gradually, a wall of isolation and rejection is erected around the artist. Filonov tries to hold on by creating a group of “masters of analytical art” - MAI in 1925, which sought to establish his method in painting.


Filonov with students

Famine 1925

February Revolution 1926

Shostakovich Symphony 1926

In 1927, Filonov's students exhibited at the Leningrad Press House and staged a production of N. Gogol's The Inspector General.

The figure of Filonov already in the 1920s turned out to be odious in the minds of those who, heading cultural departments, were sensitive, first of all, to the intonation of the artist’s self-expression, as well as to the violation of the laws of the “creed of modern realism” (Filonov’s expression). In his “Autobiography” of 1929, Filonov described himself in the third person: “Since 23, being completely cut off from the opportunity to teach and speak in print, under the systematic campaign of slander carried out against him in print and orally, Filonov has been conducting research work in development of earlier the position given to them...” The persecution of the artist in the official press was accompanied by repressive measures: in 1930, the already prepared large exhibition of Filonov at the Russian Museum in Leningrad was banned, before that he was deprived of his pension, doomed to starvation.

Drummers 1930

Collective farmer 1931

Record-breaking workers at the Krasnaya Zarya factory, 1931

Tractor workshop 1931

GOELRO 1931

Portrait of Joseph Stalin 1936

11 goals 1938

Faces 1940

Pavel Filonov died on December 3, 1941 in Leningrad, bequeathing all his works “to be donated to the Soviet state.

The volcano of lost treasures is quartered,
great artist,
eyewitness of the invisible,
canvas troublemaker
... There were a thousand paintings in his studio,
but the bloody-brown reckless drivers drove a steep road
- and now only the posthumous wind whistles there. - the poet A. Kruchenykh responded to his death.

P. N. Filonov is buried at the Seraphimovsky cemetery, in plot 16, directly next to the Church of St. Seraphim of Sarov. His sister E.N. Glebova (Filonova) was buried in the same grave in 1980.

Filonov's works were inherited by his sisters, Maria and Evdokia Filonov; in the 1970s, E. N. Glebova (Filonova) (1888-1980) donated her collection to the State Russian Museum.

***

Portrait of Evdokia Glebova - the artist's sister

Portrait of Arman Frantsevich with his son 1915

Family portrait 1924

The most secret and mysterious avant-garde artist of Russia Pavel Filonov was born in Moscow on January 8 (21), 1883 in a large family. His parents, in his own words, were “a coachman and a washerwoman.” From an early age he had the ability to draw; he had natural visual acuity, a desire to accurately convey details, and observation skills. Filonov’s earliest surviving drawing, “Moscow Courtyard” (1894), was made as a “memory postcard,” and from it one can easily imagine the true appearance of the “family nest.”

In 1894, Pavel’s mother died of consumption, and caring for his brothers and sisters fell on the shoulders of his older sister Shura, who was already living in St. Petersburg, being married to a prominent entrepreneur. Filonov himself mastered cross-stitching, and with the support of a relative, he graduated from painting and painting workshops, as well as private courses from Dmitriev-Kavkazsky. Thanks to his studies there and “solely thanks to his knowledge of anatomy,” Filonov was enrolled in the Academy of Arts as a volunteer student and in the spring of 1908 began studying there, this continued until 1910. But after 2 years of classes, Filonov left the Academy of Arts due to fundamental disagreements with the professors.

The first researcher of Filonov’s creativity V.N. Anikieva pointed out his obvious connections with Dürer and Grunewald. I could see the originals of their paintings during a trip in 1912 to the countries of Western Europe - France, Italy, Austria and Germany.

The artist became especially interested in contemporary primitivism during his stay at the Youth Union in St. Petersburg in 1910-1914, after becoming acquainted with the theories of Larionov and Goncharova.

In 1916, Filonov was drafted into the army; by that time he was already an established artist. He began to feel his creative power and sought opportunities to expand his knowledge and his skill. I greeted the 1917 revolution as a long-awaited event. For some time he headed the department in Ginkhuk.

MAI - Masters of Analytical Art - a society of students of P. Filonov (“Filonov’s school”) existed in Leningrad in 1925-1932. Members of the society at different times were T. Glebova, E. Kibrik, S. Zaklikovskaya and others. In their works they sought to embody Filonov’s principle of “madeness”. In this workshop-studio, according to the recollections of contemporaries, “everyone began to feel like an artist of the 20th century, when art and science merged.”

The artist called his method “analytical”. In it, the construction of form began as if at the atomic level. Whereas Filonov considered every touch on the canvas in the form of a dot to be an “act of action” of the artist. The basis of Filonov’s pictorial works is the careful drawing and recording of “micro-particles” from the “original principles”. This is how “multidimensional” and “incomprehensive” compositions arose, real and imaginary beings, real worlds of visible and invisible phenomena, their reactions, emanations, being, genesis, known and secret properties were born (“Declaration of World Heyday”, early 1920s. ).

In 1931, Krasnaya Gazeta called Filonov “a deranged enemy of the working class.” After being accused of “formalism” in 1936, the new term “Filonovism” became a symbol of non-proletarian, decadent art. After 1937, Filonov’s life began to deteriorate: his wife’s son was deported, and she herself became seriously ill. But even the Leningrad blockade did not force him to leave his post as custodian of his own art.

Starving during the war years, Filonov died in the first months of the Leningrad blockade (in December 1941). His death seems symbolic. She found him while on duty on the roof of a house, which he was defending from German raids.

The obituary of the artist was a drawing by one of the students, depicting a dead teacher against the backdrop of his metaphysical and very real killers - against the backdrop of the “Feast of Kings.” Another obituary can be considered a poem by the futurist poet A. Kruchenykh, a friend of Filonov:

And nearby at night In a back alley Sawed across, Quartered Volcano of lost treasures, Great artist, Eyewitness of the invisible, Troublemaker of the canvas Pavel Filonov. He was the first creator in Leningrad. But thinness From hunger, Died during the blockade, Having neither fat nor money in reserve. There were a thousand paintings in his studio. But the Bloody-Brown Reckless Drivers drove a steep road, And now there is only the Posthumous Wind Whistling

Paintings by artist Pavel Filonov.

I’ll say right away that writing about Filonov (1883-1941) is not easy. It would be better, of course, not to write about him at all, but there is no way to silently get around this block - there will be too big a hole in the history of avant-gardeism. Even against the backdrop of the extremely diverse and powerful Russian avant-garde, Filonov managed to stand out and occupy a completely special place. Why do we need holes? So there's nowhere to go.

We will start, however, with simple things - born, raised, died, a Schmomer. Filonov's parents were peasants, but at the time of his birth they lived in Moscow. His mother worked as a laundress, his father as a cab driver. Filonov received his professional education in St. Petersburg, where the family moved. At first these were painting and painting workshops, then - the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, and even later - the private school of academician graphic artist Dmitriev-Kavkazsky.

Then Filonov tried three times to enter the Academy, but was accepted only as a volunteer into its school. He studied there for two years and was actually expelled - by that time he had become friends with the St. Petersburg avant-garde artists who hung out in the Youth Union group, and his style of writing began to resemble less and less academic. Once, right in class, Filonov painted a blue-green Apollo on sketches and, in general, according to the rector of the school Beklemishev, “he corrupted his comrades with his works.” In general, Filonov left school and began exhibiting with his “allies,” which he did until World War I.

At that time, Filonov wrote the following things:

Feast of Kings

Holy family

Already here, in these initial works, it is clear that Filonov is very far from the general line along which the development of the early Russian avant-garde took place - after all, he was more oriented towards French avant-garde - Cubism with Fauvism - and, to a lesser extent, towards Italian futurism. Filonov is close to German expressionism, and to its original, one might say, classic version of the “Bridge” group, which was uncharacteristic for those times among artists living in Russia. This closeness, in addition to purely formal things, is visible in the fact that Filonov is closely within the framework of the empirically comprehensible, and in the fact that he is concerned about the fundamental themes of life and death, and in the gloomy energy and ponderous symbolism of “Kings”. In “The Holy Family” - it is later - the future, famous Filonov is already visible - in an abundance of the smallest, carefully worked out details, including in the background, behind the main characters. By the time of writing this work, Filonov had already formulated the basic principles of his analytical method: the picture develops like a living organism - from the particular to the general, as if growing through the division of cells, each of which has its own complex organization. “Draw each atom persistently and precisely. Persistently and accurately introduce the color being worked on into each atom, so that it is absorbed there, like heat into the body, or organically connected with the form, like the fiber of a flower with color in nature,” he wrote. Filonov had his own terminology, so what I more commonly called a cell, he defined as an atom.

Flowers of the world blossom

Virgin and Child (Mother)

Then the war began, and Filonov took part in it as a private. Returning to Petrograd after the revolutions, in which he showed himself to be an activist, Filonov forgot about everything except his art. He stubbornly developed his method and did not participate in any way in the struggle of avant-garde groups, which was fashionable until the Soviet government dispersed them all in 1932. He took a unique position in the Russian avant-garde. He became a prophet, messiah, ascetic, teacher, outcast and martyr all rolled into one.

Of course, there were enough messiahs, prophets, ascetics, and martyrs in the Russian avant-garde - just remember Malevich, Tatlin, Khlebnikov, El Lissitzky, Kandinsky. But for various reasons they ceased to be such at most by the second half of the 20s. Everyone who by the beginning of the 30s had not reformed and changed their principles in favor of socialist realism became outcasts. But there were practically no teachers, because... there were no students. Instead, there were followers who, quickly gaining independence, invented their own concepts and acquired followers themselves. Filonov had real students who looked into his mouth and selflessly followed him, and his “workshop of analytical art (MAI)” generally resembled a sect. In addition, practically none of the prominent Russian avant-garde artists were able to combine all these roles in one person, at least for a long time. But Filonov could, and in their most extreme manifestations.

But, in addition to all this, Filonov was also a heresiarch, if we continue to use the appropriate terminology. He created his own, completely special version of avant-garde, which was much further from all its other variants than they were from each other. Filonov, for example, dared to violate one of the most important avant-garde principles - he never denied classical art and did not fight with it. In his works, even in his last ones, one can find traces of this art - both chronologically close, like Art Nouveau and Symbolism, and much earlier, like Bosch.

Philonov's project can be described as visionary, universalist, natural-philosophical and religious with an emphasis on eschatology.

Spring formula

His works are an amazing combination of animal and plant, organic and inorganic, human and non-human, dead and living. For him, all these categories do not exist, the Universe is one, and the processes occurring in it equally combine all these oppositions, since they do not exist in it. Therefore, the elements of his works are simultaneously biomorphic and crystalline, growing and decaying.

He depicts not the surface of phenomena, but their essence, their laws, structure and processes - that which is inaccessible to the eye of an ordinary artist, but accessible to the “knowing”, as he said, the eye of an analytical artist. For Filonov, this approach was scientific; he depicted the processes that take place, for example, under human skin - blood flow, pulsation of veins, brain function. For this scientific character, Filonov re-read a bunch of literature, from Linnaeus and Darwin to Marx and Tsiolkovsky.

Heads

Living head*

Filonov’s scale is the entire Universe, from atom to infinity, from past to future. Therefore, his works are not classical compositions with different elements included in the picture format, but fragments of something larger. His works suggest that infinity continues beyond them, and they are only a part of it.

Formula of the Petrograd proletariat

Filonov himself, as a pantheistic God, embraces this entire Universe with his gaze and, at the same time, is present in every smallest particle of it. This feeling is born, on the one hand, because of the global nature of the concept - after all, it derives generalizing formulas - and because of the scrupulous elaboration of every square millimeter of the canvas. Filonov seems to be simultaneously looking at the world through both a telescope and a microscope. He takes the world literally down to quarks, and then puts it back together from them. Roughly speaking, he is actively engaged in both analysis and synthesis on a particularly small/large scale.

Formula of the Universe

For Filonov, the history of mankind is only a small part of the history of the world. The history of space, planets, life on them, geochemical and all other processes. And, again, like God, he is everywhere at the same time - in the past, future and, naturally, in the present.

Of course, all this fit poorly into the Stalinist - no less large-scale - project. I will write more about this project. Therefore, from the beginning of the 30s, when the Soviet government, by a willful decision, stopped the life of all creative groups and associations and gathered all artistic forces into the Union of Artists, things went very badly for Filonov. His personal exhibition at the Russian Museum had already been canceled before, in 29 - he really didn’t fit in anywhere. And then even the rare participation in collections and the very rare state purchases of his works stopped, for pennies, however. And Filonov was ready to sell only to his, as he believed, his native communist state - he called himself a communist. Several times he communicated with Western collectors who offered him money unheard of for him, and he refused them. Everything he created was supposed to live only in the USSR**.

At the same time, Filonov was terribly poor. In the 1930s, he continued to teach his followers semi-legally - essentially free of charge. His MAI was, perhaps, the last unofficial artistic association in the USSR under Stalin. He couldn’t get some kind of meager salary, like a trade union one, because he had to get a bunch of papers, and he, as he said, didn’t have time for this - he worked fanatically all the time. When the lack of money reached some completely hopeless limits, such as there was nothing to treat his wife, he remembered his first education - painting and art, and took up any work with a brush. Like creating a list of residents for a housing association. Or he took government orders issued for his stepson like these:

Portrait of I.V. Stalin

Tractor workshop

But even these not compromises, but, from Filonov’s point of view, direct betrayals of his path did not bring money. This was all too different from what the state was ready to buy. Stalin is somehow not divine, the workshop is not inspiring to work. In general, Filonov continued for months to eat soup from a kilogram of onions, cut in half, with carrots and potatoes (a real recipe described by his wife), develop his analytical method and secretly teach fans who came to him from all over the country.

When the war began, Filonov's main concern was the preservation of his works, which were stored in the attic studio. He was constantly on duty at night on the roof. Leningrad was bombed, including with incendiary bombs. This concern for his legacy was nothing like the artist’s usual concern for the safety of his pictures. It was, rather, a desire to save a certain body of knowledge necessary for humanity, some important evidence about something else. Filonov never had artistic ambitions in the traditional avant-garde form, like - I was the first to come up with and do it. Rather, in his eyes, he was a scientist who discovered objective laws and described an unknown reality***. In short, there, on the roof, he caught a cold. A few days later he died of pneumonia. The blockade was in full swing, everyone was weak.

Bonuses.

Liki

One of the latest works.

Flight to Egypt

He also wrote these strange pictures. The Egyptian is good. And the fact that a donkey is no different from a person is not at all strange.

* “The difference between this man’s work and the work of other artists is that while others try to depict people as they look on the outside, he has the courage to depict them as they are on the inside.” This is what the Spanish monk José de Siguenza said about Bosch. But how does he approach Filonov, with all his differences from Bosch?
** Filonov bequeathed all his works to the Russian Museum. The museum accepted the work just in case, although it kept them in storage throughout the Soviet years. In any case, thanks to Filonov’s concept of the existence of his works, we have a unique situation for our avant-garde - almost all of the work of the artist persecuted by the communists has been preserved.
*** Within the framework of this concept, he believed that his “things are the most interesting moment in all world art.” And he also said that he was making art that “all peoples of humanity would come to worship.”

Filonov West and East. 1912-191З

Filonov Pavel Nikolaevich artist

Filonov's fate

By character, Filonov was, without a doubt, of a heroic nature: an ascetic, an ascetic, an uncompromising martyr for the communist idea, a religious orthodox at first and an equally adamant atheist later. But here, too, and equally, is a gloomy nihilist, fighting one-on-one with Fate: a powerful, self-absorbed personality, as obsessed as he is rational in his attack on nature, prone to reflective loneliness, despair and longing for space.

Fate did not spare him during his life, and turned out to be unfair after his death - only in 1988, almost fifty years after his death, Filonov’s first personal exhibition was held at the State Russian Museum. Back in the 1960-1980s, his work was known by hearsay, his method seemed an esoteric science for initiates, legends circulated about Filonov’s life, the mythical side of his life and work prevailed over historical truth. The artist's discovery in the late 1980s presented him as a far from unambiguous consistent avant-garde artist who managed to combine - to the point of "eclecticism" - the incompatible.
He wanted to create a miracle: to make the people in the painting “live and embrace all the secrets of the great and poor human life”, to bring the happy time of “World Heyday” closer with his painting. Filonov, of course, is not only a local St. Petersburg saint for artists, he is a world figure: Francis of Assisi and Savonarola rolled into one. His favorite flower is the dandelion - a thin hollow stem with a transparent fluffy cap, unpretentious and stubborn, the brainchild of suburbs and landfills, making its way through the asphalt and easily disappearing into the sky.

Laborer art

In 1887, as the artist’s sister Evdokia Nikolaevna recalled, “the father, the breadwinner of the family, died suddenly.” The sisters and little Pavel cross-stitched tablecloths and towels, selling them at the Sukharev Tower. The world of the theater, the theatrical backstage life, opened up to him from both the romantic and everyday side. Even then, Filonov dreamed of becoming an artist - by his own admission, he began to draw early - from the age of three or four.
After the death of their mother in 1896, the family moved to St. Petersburg. It was a good craft school that gave a variety of technical skills, the ability to work with different materials - paint, clay, plaster, and restoration.
Filonov’s path is a path of continuous self-improvement and self-education - nothing could stop his cherished desire to become a real Master, on the contrary, everything, even the most menial work, turned to his advantage. Most of all, in the future, he will value a simple craft, a thing firmly made, with maximum perseverance and labor. St. Petersburg did not open up to Filonov from the front side.
At the same time, Filonov drew intensely and a lot, preparing to enter the Academy of Arts - and in the workshop of Lev Dmitriev-Kavkazsky, an artist famous for his graphic sketches of the everyday life of the peoples of the North Caucasus. The variety of plant and animal motifs, exotic things and subjects that interested the artist is amazing. On the road, in addition to drawings and oil studies, he wrote copies of icons for pilgrims, carefully and carefully studying the original, the iconography of the plot, and writing techniques. Filonov knew this layer of pictorial culture perfectly.
From the very beginning of our development, we see a greedy desire to learn from any material, to learn to draw everything around us, but not just to “train our hand,” but to study the subject of drawing, like a natural scientist.
By the time Filonov entered the Academy of Arts in 1908 (where he was enrolled as a volunteer only after the fourth attempt, he already had a huge art and life school behind him - he was actually an established artist - and two years later he left, realizing the fatal rejection of his works from aspects of academic professorship.
Filonov considered the ninth of January 1905 to be the starting point of his independent path in art. The artist continued to correlate his painting with revolutionary and social changes and transformations taking place in the country. Soon after leaving the Academy, Filonov created the painting Heads (1910), in one of the characters of which he depicted himself - an exhausted, intensely suffering face, as if anticipating his fate.
The painting has a wide panoramic coverage, characteristic, rather, of monumental fresco painting than of the chosen chamber format (angles, local bright decorative spots of color, spectacular, large, as if stereoscopically given subject foregrounds seem to anticipate the monumental scope of Latin American painting of the 1930s - Ribera, Siqueiros, Orozco). However, we also see how the torn off covers reveal in their naturalism dense, intertwined worlds, densely populated with plasma fluid formations: figures in which one can guess a miniature peacock, a dog, a galloping horse. A similar technique of total carpet filling of the surface with flowers, stems, birds, fish, animals and people full of vitality is often found in the artist’s paintings in the 1910s.
The same motif is implemented in the drawing of the Young Man (1909-1910), in which, upon careful examination, one can see almost complete identity of the depicted heads: front and profile. The heads of village boys in shirts, unbuttoned, with flowers and birds, are drawn with classical correctness of proportions. The profile is a perfect replica of the antique head of Apollo Belvedere.

At the same time, in 1910, Filonov became a founding member of the St. Petersburg society of artists “Youth Union” and thereby became involved in the sphere of active searches for new paths in art. He correlated his own intentions to see and depict the world from the inside, through the veils of things, with the principles of analytical attack on an object in Cubism and the dynamic transformation of space among the Futurists. Thanks to his acquaintance with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexei Kruchenykh, Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyushin and Elena Guro, the artist was faced with the most radical innovative quests in Russian art, at that time striving for liberation from objectivity, the discovery of new pictorial and verbal worlds .
Despite his completely absorbed painting and graphic work, which seemed to leave no time for anything else, Filonov was not a person with a narrow professional outlook. A broad universalist view of the high purpose of his art, of the very status of the artist - researcher, scientist and philosopher - presupposed a constant expansion of his horizons of reading and knowledge. He read, copied, studied a lot; his interests included not only art, but also philosophy, history, ethnography, and biology. To supplement his education, he made a trip abroad, traditional for pensioners of the Academy of Arts.
1912 was the year of the futurists - their exhibitions were held in many European cities. Not only old, but also modern Western art could attract the artist's attention. It was in 1912 that Filonov first formulated his artistic credo in the article Canon and Law, outlining the basic principles of his analytical art, giving a critical assessment of Picasso and Cubo-Futurism, denying their cold pictorial mechanics. The focus of his attention was not on the latest Western painting, but on the then common interest among Russian avant-garde artists in the national primitive, icon painting, popular prints, toys, and carvings. As a result of reflections on his trip, he writes two works: West and East, East and West. Later, Filonov wrote that he does not divide the world into two districts - east and west - however, it is obvious that the east, as a sphere of spiritual attraction and revelation in art, is more attractive and familiar than the west.
The development of Russian art during this period was stormy and rapid, new groups and associations were born and disintegrated, there was a rapid change of trends and orientations, manifestos were proclaimed, works were created that were, as it were, the banner of newly emerging movements. The first abstract works of Kandinsky appeared, in 1912 Larionov’s “Rauchism” arose, Tatlin created his pictorial reliefs, and Malevich approached the beginnings of Suprematism.
In 1910-1913, in Filonov’s painting there was a gradual transition from academic naturalism and the ornamentation of Art Nouveau to purist, cubized primitivist volumes. Simplification of forms, their differentiation to the level of an element, a unit, atomizes space, makes it more viscous and filled. Complexes of purely active forms arise, which are still “implanted” into the figurative field of the picture or include objective fragments, subordinating them to their crystalline “ornament”.
In his interest in the primitive, in the Middle Ages, Filonov is far from alone in the art of the early 20th century, but even here he formulates his preferences differently and defines guidelines. Both Gallic grace and Hellenic impeccability are organically alien to him; he is not attracted by either the exotic, or the spicy spirit of “barbaric” art, or the transformed plasticity of black art. He reserves only one right for the image and any form that is iconically significant for him, thereby adopting a peculiar schema - to be ugly. This is by no means a relishing of the aesthetics of the ugly, which is characteristic of jaded, bourgeois art.
Color as a conclusion from a drawing is subject to the linear and tonal rhythm and structure of the picture, which, it seems, is not written, but is sometimes drawn in brightly marked, locally “blocks” or segments, which is why there is a resemblance to the mosaic technique. These bright flashes, fragments of color often appear illogically, in the final stage of the work, built on restrained, subtly nuanced gradations of brown and blue shades, often at the border of the subject form, signifying some kind of super-real, super-sensual relationship that arises at the intersection of object and environment . Thus, the compatibility of figurative and abstract, “crumpled” and crystalline forms imparted tenacity, viscosity and tension to the form of the work as a whole.

Filonov’s linear calligraphy more and more abstracts the emerging forms, as a result of which the iconic nature of the “letter” is revealed, but not in the semantic, but rather in the formal sense: individual elements, as well as the emerging “figures” of a more general plan, resemble alphabetic, digital or another grapheme. In the drawing “Musicians” (1912) we see how individual figures of people sitting at a table are drawn with a sharp, roughly angular line and turned into a kind of hieroglyph that exists independently, like a bright, complete form. In the early works there are also purely ornamental signs, transformed by the artist into a separately drawn arabesque, a graphic figure - flowers on clothes and dishes, fish and birds.
Gradually expanding, pure geometric form leads to abstraction, with the absorption of naturalistic details into abstract figures and brightly to an abstract and detached language of formulas and compositions, in which a face, an eye, a grid, a triangle, an oval, a letter or any other conceivable geometrical grapheme are equivalent. The first formal “simplification” occurs in the early 1910s, obviously under the influence of primitive art: while drawing his “wooden” horses and archaic people, Filonov still retains the academic principle of concrete analytical study of form that he developed. The love for rough, barbarously archaic images was reflected in the future - in the special iconographic type of Filonov’s characters with chopped noses, high cheekbones, with a sharply defined skull, short and thick necks, broad shoulders, big arms and clumsy. Items that look like handicrafts are also similar to them.
Filonov was not alone in his interest in the archaic; at the same time, Khlebnikov turned to archaic languages, to Slavic folklore in search of common universal principles, a certain proto-language. To give the poetic text greater emotionality and expression, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov suggested in their collections not typographical typesetting, but a living author’s handwriting. They completely entrusted the creation of such books to artists, as a result of which in the 1910s small lithographic books were published, in which both drawings and lines of poetry, with their stylistic unity, opened up a new synthesis of word and image. In addition to Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, Filonov also took part in the creation of one of these lithographic books. It was Khlebnikov's Izbornik with two poems to Perun and Night in Galicia. In addition to screensavers and illustrations, Filonov used a special hand-drawn letter, in which individual letters are turned into a witty drawing, a pictorial symbol that helps to read the word. Khlebnikov highly appreciated Filonov's work.

Soon after the collapse of the Youth Union, Filonov tried to create his first group of masters of analytical art. The slogan was first proclaimed by him in the Manifesto of 1914, which declared a sharply negative position in relation to the existing state of affairs in art, to the oblivion of craft, that is, persistent, meticulous work, close study, comprehension of nature, and a persistent, painstaking attitude towards the pictorial surface.
Filonov’s skill developed thanks to exceptionally hard work on drawing and anatomical studies, the purpose of which was, in general, similar to the academic one: to depict the human body in such a way that the external form was formed on the basis of an expressively organized internal one (skeleton, muscles). However, unlike pictorial drawings of a tonal nature, traditional for the academic school, everything in his work is based on thin, sharply defined lines and strokes, on light halftones. The artist has a noticeably Vrubelian attitude towards drawing, which goes back to the Renaissance tradition - as a universal technical means for conveying the entire wealth of sensory and intellectual relationships. He even understands color as a correctly conveyed tone and texture.
Human. A person changes every second, continuously, at each new moment he is not equal to himself, in addition, he can be seen (simultaneously!) from different points of view, outside and inside; the boundaries of its outlines are transient, fluid, unsteady, its essence is difficult to grasp. But, resisting this mobility, Filonov’s man acquires the opposite qualities: stonyness, opacity. The carnival of transformations gives way to one rigid, idol-like mask.
With all the revolutionary, social activist pathos of Filonov himself, the leitmotif of his works becomes the unfreedom of man, the inaccessibility of a full-blooded, strong-willed principle. The lack of volitional choice, the mentally unstable state of his characters, indecision, and “sagging” action in one, positively defined sense, raise the question of the meaningfulness of human existence in general.
In the 1910s, Filonov appeared in works in which the main characters were beggars (the cycle Who Has Nothing to Lose). As if victims of an invisible fate, doomed to slaughter, these ghosts wander in the slums and labyrinths of an endless stone bag.
It is noteworthy that Khlebnikov, the poet closest to Filonov in his creative quests at that time, spoke of him this way: “Beautiful and suffering Filonov, a little-known singer of urban suffering.”
The state of anxiety and foreboding of danger and impending disaster is especially clearly expressed in the watercolor Horsemen (1913) and the painting Heads (1910), with their gloom and mystery reminiscent of prophetic visions of the Apocalypse.
With his works of the 1910s, Filonov also continues the St. Petersburg mystical tradition (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Andrei Bely), depicting a city of strange transformations, terrible visions, phantom ghost images. However, along with the “poor and wretched,” the artist demonstrates a person’s ability to rise above despair. In the watercolor The City Conqueror (1915), his hero, through a painful effort of will, overcomes the oppressive stone mass, gaining a future. The decisive will, the challenge posed by the winner to the city, pride, dignity, the stamp of suffering and loneliness on his face is a kind of self-portrait of the artist. In this performance, the lyrical hero, played by Mayakovsky himself, confronted cardboard ghost people - the Man without an Ear, the Man without an Eye and a Leg, and other half-real, half-mystical city characters.
The state of premonition, anticipation, tense expectation of a miracle or catastrophe, misfortune can also be read in the characteristic hand gestures of his characters, addressed as if to an invisible God. This prayerful gesture of hands with tightly closed palms was undoubtedly taken by the artist from an ancient Russian icon, iconographically reminiscent of the upcoming figures of saints from the Deesis rank. At the same time, Filonov’s man is far from a state of spiritual enlightenment; despondency and numbness dominate his appearance. While denouncing the city, the artist, however, does not contrast the village with it as a patriarchal, naively integral world to the urban, vicious one. The same state of sad, joyless torpor, moreover, black melancholy and melancholy can be read in his Cowsheds (1914), where the faces of milkmaids and cows are likened to each other.
Naturally, not all the heroes of Filonov’s pre-war works are beggars, but the very type of people he portrayed is still the same. Beggars... Who are they? What kind of people? Those who have nothing to lose, that is, the original person, as such, deprived (not in the sense of “victim”) of many petty and selfish problems, momentary aspirations and responsibilities. A person rejected from society and sank to the very bottom of life, perhaps having thereby learned all its hopelessness and depth, some important truths. Filonov’s people are beggars, but not as a socio-ethnographic type, but in terms of the status of a person in general, in its timeless, eternal dimension.

His characters are often deprived of clothes, or they are just rags, a rough, shabby cover that does not hide their nakedness, but emphasizes it to the utmost. Deformation, exaggeration of forms, proportions of figures give them monumentality, sometimes ascetic integrity: the body turns into a plastic sign, the energy of which is convincing and powerful. Plastic emphasis is placed on the transfer from external to internal; this deformation is not a formal technique (cubist or futuristic). Let us recall the works of Picasso, Barlach, Gross, Dix, Dobuzhinsky on this topic. All of them were interested in the problem of depicting a person at the extreme moment of his existence. Filonov’s “primordial man” is the eternal primordial man, a kind of Old Testament Adam, alone with himself, open and defenseless in the world around him. Hence their melancholy and despondency, like the ontological melancholy of inert, unincarnated matter on the way to the ideal, which in Filonov acquires an endlessly lasting character, impersonal extra-psychological qualities.
The surrounding world completely permeates this person with its fields, involving him in a spontaneous irrational movement (Rebirth of Man, 1915), invading him with its material mass, revealing the boundaries of the body (Mother, 1916), or generally exposing the insides, tearing off the skin (Heads, 1910). Therefore, the “events”, “phenomena” of his life affect only the most acute, borderline aspects of his existence: Birth, Love, Death.
The imperious, all-conquering flow of volitional movement, materialized Time is the only unconditional force that gives all Filonov’s characters the significance and authenticity of being as an eternal becoming, a chain of births and dying. The tragedy of the revolution of 1905 in the drawing Execution is revealed as an extra-personal event that scattered people into separate disunited groups, executing some (figures crucified on the cross), leaving others behind.
Topical social problems in the artist's pre-war work are resolved not in the traditions of the genre, but in a general humanistic interpretation of themes and characters. They pose questions of Good and Evil, Fate and Time, Freedom and Unfreedom, where concrete life and theater, Christianity and paganism, ethnography and anatomy are closely intertwined. It must be remembered that for Filonov, who was a real poor man and lived extremely ascetically, everything he wrote was deeply personally felt, suffered and seen. That is why the social civic position of the author, who substantiated “from below” the utopia of the future - “World Flourishing”, is so important. The author's mythology is in this case, if not the key, then a route map for replenishing and recreating intra- and inter-picture connections. It is these connections that need to be presented as a single concept, which will help shed light on the meaning and content of each specific work.

Kings

The themes, plots and characters of Filonov's works of the 1910s speak of the existence of a special artistic mythology, in which the artist resorts to a kind of secret writing and allegory. Characters appear sitting on thrones, with crowns on their heads and without crowns - these are “kings”, whose presence is sometimes difficult to explain in the context of other, more “neutral” figures. In watercolor, the man and woman are “kings” - a kind of personification of the City. Acting as supporting figures, they exist quite autonomously, localized in separate inserts-stamps. The main characters of the watercolor are naked, luminous creatures, disembodied souls of a man and a woman, looking for each other blindly, carefully, as if by touch, “tasting” a hostile space. They look like puppet figures, surrounded by ominous “kings”, ethereal symbols of the City in which they are captive.
By exposing the figures, Filonov, however, imparts to them the asexual principle, androgyny, which further enhances the impression of such a ceremonial “dance” of two people, their fear, loneliness and mutual attraction and repulsion. The kinship of their souls lies in the extreme loneliness and fatal defenselessness of each. Oleg Pokrovsky, a student of Filonov, in his memoirs calls the theme of the painting Man and Woman “bitterly loved” (according to his story, Filonov, while studying in the private workshop of Dmitriev-Kavkazsky, was unrequitedly in love with the daughter of the Norwegian ambassador, who also attended this workshop). But the main idea of ​​this topic is not Eros, but the Loneliness of man; kings are “only a gloomy background on their shaky thrones,” writes Pokrovsky. — The tyranny of power is overshadowed by the great tragedy of Eros. Frieze inside the picture - the kings disappear into nothingness.” The communicative failure that Filonov’s characters undergo delays their actual meeting for an indefinite amount of time and space, or even makes it completely impossible.
Filonov writes human tragedy, achieving in his work the depth of genuine revelation. He uses the language of metaphor and vivid, sometimes grotesque images. This is one of the few things, perhaps even the only one, where the constructed lyrical intonation is noticeable and where the story of the relationship between two people - a man and a woman - is told with such ecstatic intensity. The dramatic story of Adam and Eve living in a modern city.
Filonov should be considered as a deeply Russian artist both in form and content, who saw himself as an integral part of the national artistic tradition. He himself resembled a medieval master icon painter, a silent hesychast, cognizing revelation through intense peering, endless self-absorption and detachment from the world. An enemy of all canons and school rules, Filonov, nevertheless, saw in Russian art the manifestation of a powerful, spontaneous principle.
What should have interested Filonov in icon painting above all? What line of Russian art, its “highway” could the artist see in it, highlighting among the enormous number of icons that which met his exacting requirements? In the images of the characters in his paintings and drawings one can find at least three types of human figures with gestures, a psychological state going back to the icon, more broadly to religious art: crucified, standing, seated (with hands folded in prayer or simply present in view of some events).
WatercolorsMother (1916) and Untitled (George the Victorious) (1915) can be considered a kind of “icon,” but with an analytical study of form and construction of space. Iconographic connections with some ancient Russian icons are obvious here. The watercolor Three Figures brings to mind the motifs of the Transfiguration icon, and its rhythm, color, and monumental interpretation of forms are reminiscent of medieval fresco painting.
So, the motives of expectation, anticipation, overcoming, repentance and humility are present in Filonov’s work of the 1910s. All these motives are painted in prophetic tones - the anxiety of the Apocalypse emanates from many of his works. Perhaps Filonov’s most favorite subject of this time was the Adoration of the Magi - he wrote it five times. Perhaps kings first appear in works precisely as wise men hurrying to worship the Child. The fact that the traditional gospel plot becomes so relevant for Filonov is extremely important and sympathetic, because it was at this time that he developed his own mythology of creativity, in which the future and uniquely perceived and interpreted messianism are of great importance. It is then that the traditional belief in God begins to shift towards Man, the new Man.
The central work that reveals these connections is The Feast of Kings (1913). An eerie vision of crimson-red, crimson, black tones is presented in the picture as ghost people on thrones, overwhelming with their gloominess and gloominess, they seem to be making an apocalyptic feast.
Who are these corpse people taking revenge on? Only the dog lying at their feet has human eyes. The two figures at the table to the left crossed their arms in prayer. The special significance and anxiety emanating from this unearthly, fatal feast immediately brings to mind the Last Supper. Conventionally, there are twelve depicted (together with a hunchbacked jester, a dwarf, a dog and a monkey). But among them there is no Christ, no sacrifice, no God. They are terrible and eternal - the dead who still have power over people. In the blackness of the darkness flooded around them, houses are outlined - the City, against which the action takes place.
Iconographically, the Feast of Kings goes back to the original archetypal plot of any “feast” - the Last Supper, but in terms of content it is rather its antipode - the Satanic Supper, the Black Mass.
The depiction of figures at a table in an everyday or solemn holiday situation is one of the favorite themes in the artist’s work. In the pre-war years, we see various variations on this theme - compositions with the religious, evangelical background characteristic of Filonov of those years. In a simple family Easter meal, many-winged angels take part along with the characters sitting at the table, giving the event real empathy for the miracle of the Resurrection (Easter, 1913). A hand raised high with a glass of red wine, fish on the table... These motifs echo the Feast of Kings. By primitivizing the figures in Easter, their surroundings, the details of everyday life, Filonov thereby conveys, as it were, the very experience of this festive feast as naive-patriarchal, in which the appearance of angels is part of faith. In Easter, the traditional composition of the Trinity icon is rethought - this is evidenced, first of all, by the characters themselves, three clinking glasses at the head of the table, a maid with a tray, a dog and a cat.
However, the Feast of Kings reads more than just the Last Supper and the plague feast. In Friedrich Nietzsche's book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which preaches the coming of a new "superman" with a new conscience, there is a chapter called the Feast. Who gathered at Zarathustra's feast? Returning to the cave in the evening, Zarathustra heard “a great cry for help.”
According to Nietzsche, the new god for the modern lost world, personified by those gathered in the cave, should become the superman whose coming Zarathustra preaches. And perhaps the philosopher’s irony is hidden in the very selection of heroes. After all, the voluntary beggar is the same gospel beggar in spirit, about whom it is said: “blessed are the poor in spirit, for they will enter the kingdom of God,” next to the Pope is the head of the church, the donkey, which was a sacred animal, and all the other characters gathered in Zarathustra’s cave , his interlocutors, whom he calls “higher people.”
When reading these lines, it is as if Philonov’s Feast of Kings comes to life before us. Looking at the faces depicted in the picture, you see that many have their mouths open, but at the same time they are focused and directed into themselves.
In the painting the kings are either in rags or naked; in the earlier watercolor sketch they are seated in rich robes with precious crowns on their heads. There is no figure of a woman here yet, which Filonov will highlight with light in the picture. These artist’s quests testify to deep philosophical thoughts. As a result, in the film he abandoned the fabulous ethnographic details, giving his images a refined characterization - a sentence.
Despite all the similarities both in description and in thought, Filonov’s Feast of Kings is not derived from the retold scene of the feast in Nietzsche. The analogy shows that Filonov’s phenomenon was included in the mainstream of pan-European thought of that time, and also speaks of the ambiguity of the images created by the artist, which are not amenable to unambiguous interpretation.
In 1913, when the Feast of Kings was created, Filonov was thirty years old - and this is the age of Zarathustra, the prophet reflecting on life. It is no coincidence that the artist places the Feast on the cover of the Manifesto. With the pathos of Zarathustra, he prophetically firmly proclaims a new era - “the age of made paintings and drawings,” affirming a new attitude towards work as long and persistent, without which true insight is impossible. Let us remember: “...hordes of laborers of art are needed so that one or two can create immortal things.” And the artist himself was this new person, penetrating into spheres and phenomena, feeling himself and the whole world as one, connected and animated, and painting as a continuation of the process of an ever-creating and changing life.
The Formula for the Power of Evil, the terrible images of kings-rulers found in the Feast of Kings, will later vary in the works of the 1920-1930s (a monkey with a baby in the Formula of the Bourgeoisie and an atheistic popular print
Last Supper; a head in a crown - in the Formula of Imperialism; the figure of the Pope or Catholic priest with a cross in his hands - in the picture Colonial Policy and the Intervention Formula).
The Feast of Kings, with its ominous infernality of images and bloody darkness of colors, demonstrates the pitch-black abyss of Evil - fear, despondency, anxious numbness and witchcraft mystery. Monstrous types, reminiscent of Leonardo's grotesque heads, speak of the artist's passion and special interest in images of ugliness, pathology, grotesque and horror. All the more surprising is such a gloomy, hopeless view of the artist in line with his understanding of history as a continuous evolution towards “World Flourishing”. Surprising, but understandable, since, having reached the bottom of the abyss, a person must find in himself the will and desire to move upward, for the better.

World Heyday
The revolutionary ideas of the artists of the early 20th century, in their own understanding, were consonant with the modern second “Copernican” revolution in science and natural history. Art was supposed to make a revolution similar to discoveries in science.
Filonov was convinced that the artist, with his strong-willed organizing principle, was given the power to hold the threads of life in his hands, overcoming death. Such an unconditional vital force, having mastered which one can overcome death or even “remove” it by including it in the flow of “eternal life”, is evolution. According to the artist, the one who holds in his hands the “initiative of evolution” will be able not only to convey images of changing existence, but also to create existence itself, accelerating the transformation of all forms and beings.
It was then, in the 1910s, that works united by the common idea of ​​“World Flourishing” appeared.
The miracle of a person’s birth and the wonderful world of Joy and Goodness that accompanies his birth are conveyed by the artist to the Holy Family as a pledge, a promise of the lost Paradise. The awkwardly turned, as if “dislocated” hand of the baby in the very center of the picture makes us especially acutely worry about him, since thanks to the concentration of all the characters on the baby, we understand the world around us - as if seen through his, the child’s, eyes - for the first time. The floral richness of the form, where blooming matter signifies and reveals the peak of its development, is conveyed by the artist with flaming fiery scarlet, orange and crimson colors, as a powerful hymn to life, its magical quality - birth.
Joseph's gesture of surprise fills the picture with a touching and naive feeling. Patriarchalism, archaism, the unity of man and nature express the idea of ​​the unity of all things, the primitive equality of all living beings - “let every breath glorify the Lord.” So it is with Filonov - every cell of the pictorial fabric of his work makes the space alive, animated.
Filonov called his method “double naturalism”; it made it possible to convey the known nature as accurately as possible. In addition to abstract and semi-abstract things, in which, nevertheless, a figurative objective principle is very clearly, sensually and physiologically present, he created truly naturalistic works. These are mainly portraits of: sister Evdokia Nikolaevna Glebova (1915), Armand Aziber with his son (1915), Joseph Stalin (1930).
Christian subjects and iconography, the motives of his works make it possible to treat some of them from a traditional religious and philosophical point of view. However, in addition to this, the artist in the 1910s developed his own, his own faith, and on its basis - artistic mythology. In 1915, a difficult war year for Russia, he painted Flowers of World Bloom, which most clearly express the main idea of ​​his work - the idea of ​​\u200b\u200b"World Bloom" - as the blooming complexity of a transformed spiritualized world. The artist endows each fragment of form in the painting with explosive generating power. Passive blind matter seems to acquire the will and power of becoming. Organic matter, life, with its fractional cellular connection, causes the armored crystalline surface to burst from the inside, as a result of which the viewer is present at the very process of blossoming, birth, and formation of the new. This new quality of the world is mysteriously and incomprehensibly combined with Christian images - flowering fragments of forms form silhouettes of seated figures, compositionally reminiscent of the famous Rublev Trinity.
Filonov’s favorite color scheme, where bright red and blue are refracted, then fade, then flare up in the endless folds and edges of the objective-non-objective world. Their rhythm makes one, rather, “hear” images that have a large spatio-temporal extent. Filonov's painting is comparable to the sound of an organ, filling the architecture of a Gothic temple with its voluminous bass sound, echoing it with endless development, repetitions and variations of one musical theme.
Later, in the 1930s, Filonov told his students, recalling the war: “Whoever has not been under bullets has never seen life.”
The significant difference lies in the methods of achieving this goal: Filonov takes upon himself the entire enormous burden of purely individual menial work, paving the way for his students by his example as a Master. Creativity, understood as something done (this includes hard work on a thing), transforms and calls to become the highest, remaking the intellect of the artist and the viewer, bringing them to a more mature form.
The “tool,” the decisive factor in this alteration, is the analytical method, the “made” picture.
A rational, scientifically based method of creativity, precise calculation - this is what Filonov wants to put at the basis of the work of a master analyst. “World Heyday” is not just a social slogan, as the artist himself said. Obviously, this presupposes the flourishing of the whole world precisely from a biological, vital-activist point of view. It is important to note that the artist was acutely aware of the breadth of the task and the invaluable burden of responsibility that he himself bears, “breaking the path for the intellect into the distant future.” This, indeed, is the ascetic, stylite activity of Filonov. Asceticism, faith and asceticism are in the maximalist, apostolic statements of the artist. The more catastrophic the time became, the louder and more affirmative the Master’s voice sounded, the more will and pressure there was in his words. He was undoubtedly endowed with the gift of teaching and preaching. That is why, having faith, he predicts a quick victory for the analytical art, insists on its future mass popularity, accessibility for everyone who wants to master it, to turn a student into a master.

Formula
He developed a special type of easel painting - “formula”.
The period of writing the formulas covers the time of the highest civic activity of the artist, the time of correlation, it seemed, with the coincidence of his fate with global changes in the country of the victorious proletarian revolution and the craving for novelty and decisive changes. In 1923, his Declaration of World Prosperity was published, at the same time he made a report on the creation of a Museum of Artistic Culture with a research department.
In analytical art, the “formula” also appears as the most concentrated expression of the artist’s aspirations in achieving his goals - both artistic and general ideological. It is no coincidence that Filonov called them “formulas.”
only those paintings in which some global concept is realized, often not of a sensual, emotional, but of an abstract and abstract nature. In the Russian avant-garde, only Filonov and Pavel Mansurov used the word “formula” in the titles of their paintings.
Are textures and colors given naturalized, that is, extremely sensual, even physiologically experienced qualities? Filonov had a concept about such qualities of form as: Distrust of the visible world of ready-made natural forms leads to the need for the emergence of an invented form. This mistrust also reveals a desire to overcome the limited capabilities of a person’s visual perception, to liberate him from the captivity of everyday life. Each unit of action - the moment of touching the canvas - is the result of an instant reaction, the artist’s contact with the revealed, felt and foreseen content.
Each moment of touching the canvas - the action of an invented form - each time gives rise to a separate, that is, abstract element of form. “Abstract” because the super task or goal of the whole picture is to give a complete all-encompassing synthesis, that is, a formula of being, and this can only be done based on the initial determination of the “purity” of all primary components.
Filonov writes like a pathologist with a microscope - he dissects the “body”, the “living”, and at the same time this “body” for him is not only a biological, but also a social, ethnographic, class or other phenomenon. It is obviously impossible to depict social anatomy without replacing the physiological naturalized form with an irrespective, “abstract” form.
Another interesting question is: how the abstract primary element of form, or, better said, geometrized, simplified (gravitating towards a rectangle, triangle, sphere, circle, line) forms with the help of atomism, consistency. At any moment he is extremely responsible for her. At what point does a rational, conceptual, logical principle join this purely “craft” work of the hand and hand? Maybe this is the path of creativity from the unconscious to the most conscious, conscious, like the path of the evolution of matter itself in life, according to Filonov. The artist is concerned only with the elements of connection, entering, as an arbiter, into those special turning points when, in his opinion, it is necessary to make a stop, a transition, “to modify the choice.”
It is important to imagine the element of the first form in Filonov as an amalgam of the logical and rational, physiological and natural. Therefore, the living cell and crystal structure become a symbolic metaphor for both the psyche and the intellect of the creator, and the object that knows and is known, and the abstract concept. Accordingly, the depth and spatiality of the picture field is determined by the volume, extent, boundaries and connections of these primary elements. Everything is equal in this space, and therefore the significance of the main and secondary parts in the picture is weakened: the background disappears, there is no usual division into plans, the opposition of top and bottom, right and left is blurred. Some formulas consist entirely of such penetrating force vectors that create extreme dynamics within the picture field. Spatial forms superimposed on each other create the experience of multi-layeredness, infinity, matter unfolded before the viewer, which calls deeper, revealing new horizons.
Accuracy, flexibility, universality, the comprehended law of things, concepts in an absolute and adequate form give rise to an objective formula. In 1922, he dedicated it and the painting The Formula of the World Revolution to the proletariat of Petrograd and donated them to the Petrograd Soviet. It is also important to note that the artist himself identified himself with the proletarian, the main character of World Bloom.
In the Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat, through an infinite number of fragments, abstract geometric forms, individual object outlines emerge, among which the figure of the main character, the walking proletarian, stands out. In a homogeneous lava of forms without beginning or end, clearly objectified fragments appear: a cart with horses, houses, faces, human figures, a tree, a fish, but they also fall apart into separate smaller complexes of forms. The multiplying faces are absolutely incorporeal, transparent and thin. The artist seems to be marking out the folded, sinuous structure of a map of the highlands, superimposing an aerial view onto the crystalline tectonics of the intellect. The character's crystallographic brain grows, as if capturing the space around it with a series of multiplying heads and forming spherical inversion fields.
In Formula of Spring (1928-1929), the artist managed to convey the joy of a stunning picture of multi-colored space, of unfolding endless worlds. For Filonov, who always lived poorly and treated every piece of paper with care, this gift was of great value. In this formula, the explosion of colorful matter of form is especially noticeable; particles of color form a cosmic vortex, creating spatial depth and extent of extraordinary force. The formula of spring turns out to have a mighty crown and roots - it contains the entire universe; both a metropolis and a powerful explosion, removing the veils of the unimportant, passing through and drawing us to the mysteries of existence. In the 1930-1940s, the name “formula” disappeared from his work.

Paintings and drawings made
The analytical method that the artist defended affirmed a fundamentally new type of creativity, based on the principles of the “seeing” and “knowing” eye. The “seeing” eye sees objects superficially, only their color and shape, but the knowing eye allows you to see the world through and through, making visible the invisible processes of its formation and growth. With the help of his method, as Filonov believed, any artist can fully reveal his capabilities. Since with the help of a knowing eye and analytical intuition one can achieve the most complete objective understanding of the world, Filonov called his method “double naturalism.”
“Double naturalism” put forward by Filonov does not at all indicate the doubling of nature, reality according to the principle of reflection, nor does it indicate the creation of a new nature arising on the basis of the known laws of the surrounding reality. According to Filonov, most of what the master of analytical art depicts lies in the mental sphere, the intelligible region of concepts, images, ideas - in the sphere of memory, knowledge, experience.
For Filonov, who worked eighteen hours a day, the time spent creating a thing meant living a life. The assertion that the artist is part of the sphere of phenomena allows us to radically rethink the traditional boundaries of interaction between the subject and object of creativity. Filonov wrote that the artist “must see with the brain” or, in his own words, with the “knowing eye” as a kind of inner eye that allows one to interact with the subject more deeply, on an intuitive level.

Filonov’s “naturalism” is manifested not in what is seen (“the seeing eye”), but in what is known (“the knowing eye”). The drawing seems to shed the flesh, revealing the skeleton of the structure. What he loses in naturalism and sensuality, he gains in intellectualism.
In the drawing Hunger (1925), which touches on the important existential foundations of the artist’s work, in which the purist strict lines and crystalline cold sparseness of all components of the work are inextricably linked with the ascetic, ascetic lifestyle of its creator, there is one characteristic realistic detail - a butterfly, depicted with entomological precision, which is why she resembles a mummy, a dried up light exhibit. The thinnest pen lines are echoed by filigree blue and red watercolor stripes, sometimes drawn as if along a ruler, sometimes marked with subtly dotted light dotted lines; the smallest capillary suspension leaves its pale pattern on the matte yellow of the “parchment” paper. Emaciated faces, abstract truncated forms ultimately create the necessary emotional mood, image, “formula” of hunger. We see extremely thin and depleted matter, the weightiness and weightlessness of all parts of the drawing, the main one of which is a dead butterfly with a symmetrical black and white design.
In the drawing Man in the World (1925), where such a unit - a spatial cell - turns out to be a tight frame-cage with a human head enclosed in it. Here the boundary is not the conventional line of a flat geometric figure, but a three-dimensional, prismatic structure that reveals not abstractness, but a concrete image filled with living, metaphorical meaning.
Most often, in the drawings of the 1920s, Filonov uses a sharp, pointed-angular contour stroke, often completely filled with dry, even withered lines. Reduced forms are a technique characteristic of everything, and especially of the artist’s late work. Faces, bodies, heads, houses seem to be cut out, cut by a decisive hand, radically reshaping them at its discretion. The artist mercilessly chops off and shortens arms, fingers, skulls, and tree branches. As a result, a world of images appears, consisting of cuts and stumps: tree stumps, masks and busts of people, crushed cubes of houses, horses and cows, without hooves, as if with cut off legs. Numerous cuts, cuts, chopped off forms correspond to the artist’s theoretical postulates about a pure active form, sharply and analytically revealed. This approach to any studied object or phenomenon reveals the gaze of an artist-anatomist, demonstrating numerous sections of living nature in a special atlas.
Archaic and patriarchal images, ethnographic originality almost disappear in Filonov’s works of the 1920s. Their place is entirely taken by the actual, socio-political typicality of the characters. This is especially noticeable in the drawings, many of which approach the genre of political, acutely social popular prints and caricatures. In these works, the grotesque and archaic sharpness of Filonov’s images acquire ironic, caricatured features of a poster nature (Nadechiki, 1922; Colonial Policy, 1926).
Drawings on topical topics reflected the changes that had occurred in the artist’s worldview - an unsociable recluse before the revolution, in the 1920s he considered it necessary to openly publicly declare his position, defending the correctness of his method in the unfolding struggle of trends in art. After the “Exhibition of All Directions” in 1923 at the Academy of Arts, students flocked to Filonov as one of the leading masters of new art, and already in 1925, an exhibition of Filonov’s workshop was held with great success.
It was not easy to study with Filonov; not all students survived, but those who passed the test using his method were grateful to the master. Filonov did not make any allowances for incompetence or inexperience, placing very strict demands on the work, believing that “the student is a learning master from the first moment of training.” He replaced the concept of “creativity” with “madeness”. The attitude of being done was included in the logically coherent concept of his work as the highest criterion of skill and content in evaluating a work. The artist did not accept etudes, sketches, school work “in the basket”; perfection was part of the very process of working on a thing, where every touch of the brush to the canvas was supposed to convey the intense energy of thought.
Filonov conducted all his classes in his workshop, devoting a lot of time to his students. He not only gave instructions on how well the drawing should be corrected, but also gave lectures, since a true master of analytical art must be a deeply educated person. From Filonov's school came such great masters as Pavel Kondratyev, Tatyana Glebova, Alisa Poret, Vasily Kuptsov, Nikolai Evgrafov, Boris Gurvich, Vsevolod Sulimo-Samuillo.
"Even Suffering"
In the watercolor GOERLO (1931) we see several pictorial plans clearly divided into rectangles. The figure of Lenin, standing before the workers marching towards him, is compositionally isolated into a separate “stamp” (in comparison with the icon, where there is a center and marks surrounding it). The very figure of the leader of the proletariat is small, episodic, even confused. He is not a hero, not a superman, not a winner, not a demiurge, but he is alone, and his isolation is emphasized. The workers or ordinary people depicted in the procession, as in an elongated, sculptural frieze, with their gestures and movements express struggle, desire, involvement, determination to act, and finally, confidence in the future. The human impulse is colored by the tension of expectation, longing for the speedy implementation of socialism.
In the portrait of Nikolai Glebov-Putilovsky (1935-1936), the head literally grows in the flows and swirls of abstract forms. Filonov practically does not change the nature of these forms, moving on to the appearance of the person being portrayed - the same short lines and dots of the background naturally penetrate into it, giving the entire image a high homogeneity (with all the different quality diversity). However, while affirming the unity of all components of the world, the atomistic nature of its original design, the portrait does not disintegrate the being, the essence of man to the point of annihilation, oblivion of images. Unsteadiness, fluidity, fragments of organized chaos coexist with a finite, closed individual form, which burdens the impersonal, infinite beginning with the private, human.
Revolutionary, communist, socially active person, writer Glebov-Putilovsky in Filonov’s portrait appears as a strong-willed intellectual, a kind of “winner of the city” twenty years later. Tension, torment, somewhat arrogant, suffering pride and at the same time the feeling of heavily treading, brute force - the time of the future as an inevitable fate in the watercolor of 1915 give way to the appearance of a much lighter, mobile universal space and time of the present with clearly captured in it, but all some kind of unsteady imprint of a private, concrete fate.

The person in these works is a perceiving and at the same time transmitting unit; it represents varying degrees of individualization and personification. This question of the correlation between the individual and the whole as subordination or, conversely, the expression of the general will, the flow of time, common fate, the elements of nature is especially acute in those works of the artist where it is not the hero who speaks, but the chorus - the human multitude.
In the 1920s, Filonov created works that were the result of direct experience of the events of the First World War, revolution, and Civil War. The themes and plots of most works of this period are execution, uprising, war, murder, protest, revolution, unfreedom, defenselessness against the elements. The furious world, like a beast, attacks people, revealing the extreme precariousness and tragedy of their existence. The time when “not a hero, but a choir” perishes gave an epic character to Filonov’s works of that time (Protesters, 1920; Multi-figure composition, 1920s. After the raid, 1938?; Composition. Raid, 1938; Man in the world, 1925).
Filonov's unmistakable intuition and merciless analytical mind allowed him to maintain the necessary distance from time and speak about it harshly and categorically. In this, the artist turns out to be close to Khlebnikov. The formula of the Petrograd proletariat and Ladomir in a similar tonality express the element of revolution as a cosmic revolution. At the same time, the painting People and Beasts and the poem Night in a Trench are examples of a different order, showing images of brutal violence and terror.
Themes of mass terror and violence are embodied in a whole series of works of the 1920s. Why was the artist so interested and constantly excited by the theme of human unfreedom and the existence of Evil? One could explain this burning interest by character traits and uncompromising civic position. But let us note the following: the challenge once thrown by the artist to the kings of this world, to the loneliness of the prophet, who cannot help but shout the words of truth.
In the 1920s, the image of man largely lost the depth of its metaphysical, spiritual dimension. “Even suffering is their unknown destiny...” (Nikolai Zabolotsky). The “uniform suffering” of protesters, defeated, overturned people in the compositions of the 1920-1930s, stoic defenselessness, lack of real indignation, indignation at the evil falling from nowhere... What a striking contrast between Filonov’s Composition (Raid) and Picasso’s Guernica (1937), where the main the metaphor, the image of the massacre, is the screaming head of a woman: the scream is like shock, pain. But the tightly closed lips are stern - the characters in Filonov’s painting are voiceless and silent. It is impossible to determine whether they are already dead or alive, their faces are so concentrated and impassive. The dating of this thing (1938) is controversial, since it is not documented whether Filonov knew about the tragedy of Guernica, but he knew very well what was happening in his country. The tragedy of people defeated, shot, and thrown on top of each other is compositionally solved as a fragment of some all-encompassing, endless tragedy. “The time of large, wholesale deaths” dictated the epic. All the more terrible for its merciless, impersonal dispassion is the picture, which, in fact, has no name.
Which artist of the 1920s, and especially the 1930s, depicted so many defeated people, victims of “invisible fate”?
Annihilation, absorption of human forms, immersion of figures in an environment that “eats” them, behaving aggressively and assertively - these are the motives of analytical painting in general, which manifested themselves especially clearly during this period.
The artist rightly pays great attention to the psychological characteristics of the drummers. However, the tension of work in the faces of the drummers turns into the tension of gloomy tragedy. The figures appear frozen, as if they were engaged in some kind of sacred rite, and not in shock socialist work.”
“It’s impossible to make money from art.”
Soon the exhibition was completely compiled - 300 paintings and graphic works reflected the entire creative path of the artist. A catalog was printed, but... the exhibition never opened. The struggle for its opening unfolded in the press and at closed public meetings. A viewing of the exhibition was organized especially for the workers, apparently so that they could say their “weighty proletarian word” by condemning the formalist who was alien to them. But the workers, contrary to expectations, expressed their approval. Among the reviews were the following: “Yes, this is not clear to me, but I want to understand it. The exhibition needs to be opened,” “Whoever was in the German war will understand.” An ideological stance against Filonov’s art began to take effect, which, given the artist’s uncompromising position, would soon lead him to almost complete isolation from artistic life.
True, a kind of compensation for the failed exhibition was Filonov’s participation in the exhibition “Artists of the RSFSR for 15 Years”, grand in scope and number of works presented, from which the Tretyakov Gallery wanted to buy two of his works. However, Filonov refused: despite the difficult financial situation and rare, uninteresting orders, he did not sell his works on principle and did not give them to exhibitions abroad (when such offers still existed), believing that they should first be shown at home, in the Soviet Union. Union. Filonov envisioned creating a Museum of Analytical Art based on all his works transferred to the proletarian state, but his dream was not destined to come true.
In the artist’s diary, there are almost no complaints about life; on the contrary, with enviable inflexibility, he continues to defend analytical art in defiance of everyone, defending his school, each of his students from the attacks of the “iso-bastards”.
The 1930s became a time of difficult trials for Filonov. From now on, after the party has established a new artistic canon - the method of socialist realism - the names of Filonov, Malevich, and other artists of the Russian avant-garde, guilty of “formalism” and “bourgeoisism,” will be erased from the artistic life of the country.
The method of socialist realism was not completely alien to Filonov himself; he even tried to interpret it in his own way, creating realistic things, albeit in line with his method. The themes and subjects of his paintings and those of his students on the rare orders they had to fulfill were typical of Soviet artists of the 1930s. Gradually, he and his students (who were even required to renounce their teacher) were deprived of orders and put on starvation rations. But even where some kind of compromise was possible, Filonov never made concessions. He was extremely sensitive to bureaucracy, hucksterism, and speculation on socialist realism among art officials; he spoke sharply about this in his diary, calling the Union of Artists the Black Hundred and “iso-fascists.”

Obviously, then a portrait of Stalin was painted from a photograph. His students also had to paint similar portraits of leaders. Criticizing one of these works. For all the precision with which the portrait of Stalin was executed, Filonov, as always, managed to convey something more than the recognizable face of the leader. It is enough to peer into the hypnotic snake's gaze and feel the cold, deathly texture of the seemingly miraculous surface of the canvas. This work is worth comparing with the artist’s “living heads”, created at the same time.
Filonov’s numerous studies of “heads” can be considered as a genre of unique “portraits” with the timeless, that is, ahistorically specific status of a person revealed in them.
The living head, heads, is the central motif of the artist’s work.
What happens in the human head, physiological processes at the level of the chemistry of thought, inside and outside the skull, the interaction and interpenetration of the surrounding world and man are shown using concise metaphorical and formulaic notations. Together with the characters, the viewer is involved in the perception of this world, given both as will and as representation. Human beings are doomed to transformation, constant mutations and metamorphoses; their appearance, with all its sometimes formulaic laconicism, is devoid of a final statement.
The study of the possibilities of human consciousness, its vision, ideas and sensations, immersion in the depths of the subconscious gave birth to a host of phantom images. What is happening inside them is turned inside out, transposed outward; at all levels of spatial sections of the analyzed world, human life and the complex operational work of thought are clearly shown, literally scanned as if on a screen.
In the painting Man in the World (1925), many human heads are enclosed in rigidly structured frames - cages, cubes, bars. The artist anatomizes the space of thought, giving successive layers of living sections, revealing the world as a bottomless palimpsest. In his biased, mercilessly veristic studies of man, he uses various iconography: a stone mask, a dissected head, an iconographic face, a traditional pictorial “portrait”, a plane children’s drawing, a skull.
In turn, the pictorial environment absorbs, eats up the human face, which has already become vague, - it behaves assertively and aggressively - it seems to wall it up in a lattice, an endless stone lace. Faces (1940) is a kind of artist’s requiem, which reflects the artist’s sad reflections on human freedom and lack of freedom, on memory and oblivion, on life and death. The faces tell more about the time of their creation than any of his other works - they capture inexorably indifferent, silent suffering.
After 1937, the life of Filonov, his family and friends continued to deteriorate: Pyotr Serebryakov, the artist’s stepson, was exiled, his wife became seriously ill; old friend and defender, art critic Vera Anikieva spent a month under arrest, son-in-law Nikolai Glebov-Putilovsky, who did a lot to promote Filonov’s art and for him personally, ended up in a camp in 1938, where he died. All these years, Filonov led a half-starved life, rejecting the pension and rations due to him as a cultural worker and declaring that those who offered them humiliated him and did not value him as a great proletarian artist.
When the Great Patriotic War began, he found himself deprived of even a minimum of orders and did not even receive bread cards from the Union of Artists. During the raids on the city by fascist aviation, the artist, like other Leningraders, was on duty on the roof of his house, putting out lighters.

Pavel Nikolaevich was born in 1882 into a poor family of peasants who moved to Moscow in search of a better life. His father worked as a coachman, and his mother worked as a laundress.

Since childhood, the boy proved himself to be a talented student who managed to graduate from the capital's parish school with honors. In 1897, he entered the painting and painting workshops of St. Petersburg, and also studied at the evening department of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists and with Academician Dmitriev-Kazakov. After several unsuccessful attempts to enter the Academy of Arts, the young man was still able to become its volunteer student, but after a couple of years he left its walls, since the views of the academicians were too far from his emerging avant-garde worldview.

Filonov is considered the founder and teacher of analytical art, who not only developed this direction, but also taught a whole galaxy of students at his school. The artist wrote articles on this topic, gave lectures, developed a manifesto and declaration of analytical art with his colleagues, and wrote several works on this topic. And in the 1920s, he created MAI - his school of masters of analytical art, in which about seventy students studied over many years of activity. It is considered one of the largest schools of Russian avant-garde artists.

Filonov participated a lot in exhibitions of the Youth Union, a free exhibition in Petrograd, in the exhibition Artists of the RSFSR for 15 Years, and in several personal events. Also, a large number of exhibitions dedicated to the artist’s works took place after his death.

The artist's life ended tragically. He died of starvation in 1941 during the siege of Leningrad at the age of 58. Today he is considered one of the most significant figures in the history of painting, and his works are in the best museums and private collections.

Artist's creativity

Early works

Filonov's first significant works date back to the period 1912-1913, that is, he was written a couple of years after leaving the Academy of Arts. These are works “The Feast of Kings”, “Man and Woman”, “West and East” and others, made in a style close to modernism and symbolism. Already during this period, the artist created paintings using color cells, painstakingly describing each of them.

Analytical art

Filonov first outlined the principles of analytical art in the article “The Canon and the Law.” The new teaching was based on cubism with its geometrically conventional forms and fragmentation of depicted objects. However, cubism, according to Filonov, was too rational, so he introduced the principle of organic growth of form and “madeness” of paintings.

“Madeness” is proclaimed in his teaching as the only professional criterion for evaluating a created work. It refers to the maximum return from the artist’s work with the painting. And the more actively the artist thinks and analyzes the future work and each of its elements, the stronger the finished canvas will influence the viewer. So, he painstakingly painted a multi-meter canvas “Formula of Spring” and other paintings, from one edge to the opposite, with a thin brush.

In this sense, Filonov contrasted his teaching with the views of other avant-garde artists. He believed that the most valuable thing in a painting is that powerful work with the help of which the artist reveals himself and his soul. He called the modern age the age of made paintings and drawings and called on artists to persistently and accurately depict every atom, introduce every color.

However, society did not accept the artist’s ideas. His attempts to introduce a new theory at the Academy of Arts were not successful, but his refusal was the reason for the creation of his own MAI school in the 1920s. From this time on, the active development of analytical art began, the paintings “Living Head”, “Composition”, “Formula of Spring” and others were created. The work of the school was also carried out within the framework of analytical art.

It was difficult to promote new art, since hostile members of society did their best to prevent the spread of an incomprehensible movement. Filonov was declared an enemy of the working class and persecuted in every possible way. So, in 1929, the audience never saw the exhibition he prepared. The persecution led to the artist's poverty. Note that he also did not sell his paintings, dreaming of organizing a museum of analytical art and donating all his paintings to it.

Records at auctions, the price of Filonov’s paintings

Let's find out how much Filonov's paintings cost on the modern market. To do this, let's look at several examples of sales of his works in different price categories at well-known auctions.

The largest sale of the painting “Adoration of the Magi” to Christie’s in 2006 is considered to be the largest. It was painted in 1913 - at a time when the artist finally broke ties with the academic school and completely went into avant-garde movements. After Filonov’s death, the original work was in the collection of his sister E.N. Glebova, and in 1990 it was sold at Sotheby's. In 1992, the painting was presented at the exhibition “Malevich and Filonov” in Paris.

At the Christie auction, the new owner put it up with an estimate of 250-350 thousand pounds, but during the auction the price increased several times and reached 904 thousand pounds ($1.8 million).

The second major sale also dates back to 2006. This time, the canvas “Beggars and Street Children (Poor People)” was sold at Sotheby’s. The picture has an interesting origin and a complex fate. Its creation began with Filonov’s students, who were preparing the project for the Leningrad exhibition in 1927. The work was carried out on both sides of one canvas. On the right side, Tatyana Glebova painted the “Prison” plot, and on the left, Alisa Poret worked on “Beggars.” However, Filonov himself actively helped Alice work on the painting, as evidenced by the amazing power of painting the work, surviving photographs and memories of the students.

Later the paintings were divided. The work “The Beggars and the Homeless” ended up with Filonov’s student Boris Gurvich, then went to Alisa Poret herself, after which it was in the hands of M. Makarenko and went under the hammer twice. In 1967, the work was exhibited in Novosibirsk at an exhibition dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of Soviet power. At Christie's the work was exhibited with an estimate of 1-1.2 million dollars and sold for one and a half million dollars.

If we talk about smaller departures, then this is, for example, the sale of two paintings without a title. The first of them is a multi-figure composition belonging to the studio of Pavel Filonov. From the collection of the artist’s sister, it came to Galerie Gmurzynska in Cologne, where it was presented to the public at an exhibition of Filonov’s paintings in 1992. In 2016, the painting went to Sotheby's for 100 thousand pounds ($124 thousand) with an estimate of 30-50 thousand pounds.

The second untitled work was sold at Sotheby's in 2007. She also exhibited in Cologne in 1992 and again in Zurich in 2003. The painting was presumably created in 1922-1925, when heads depicted without bodies became one of the key themes in the artist’s work. With an estimate of 50-70 thousand pounds, the work was sold for 90 thousand pounds (177 thousand dollars).

In order for the answer to the question of how much Filonov’s paintings cost to be complete, we will also mention other costs. This is the sale of the paintings “Abstract Composition with Spheres” (Christie`s, 1999, 45.5 thousand pounds), “Three Faces and a Horse” (Christie`s, 2000, 46 thousand pounds) and other paintings.

Examination and sale of Filonov’s paintings

How to evaluate Filonov's painting

Why do we recommend that an examination of Filonov’s paintings be carried out? Firstly, to verify its authenticity. Secondly, to understand in what price category it can be offered. The fact is that the work of the same master can cost millions of dollars, or it can claim only a few thousand. This can be determined by an expert who is well versed in a specific era, different creative periods of Filonov himself and takes into account the current situation on the market.