Dark Vision

For the enigmatic Russian artist Pavel Filonov, recognition has been painfully slow in coming. In the 1930s, the Soviet state made him a nonperson for being “hostile to socialism.” Marginalized, his work banned, he died in December 1941, at the age of 58, along with more than 800,000 other victims who starved during the Nazi siege of Leningrad; his faded artistic prominence was enough to secure him no more than a grave of his own. His works resurfaced only under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reform when in 1988 the State Russian Museum in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) mounted an exhibition of Filonov’s extraordinary pictures — sometimes dark, at other times euphoric — that later traveled to Paris and Düsseldorf. After that there were only a couple of small shows in Russia, until last summer, when St. Petersburg’s Russian Museum, assisted by Moscow-based Proactive PR, put together the most comprehensive exhibition of Filonov’s work ever assembled. That show’s stint in Moscow at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts’ Museum of Private Collections has proved such a critical and popular success that it has been extended through March 12. “The show proved even more of a landmark event than we expected,” says the Pushkin’s private collections director, Nataliya Avtonomova.

Little wonder. The 138 paintings and drawings, most of them selected from some 300 of Filonov’s works donated by his sister Yevdokiya Glebova to the Russian Museum in 1977, open a window into the disturbing and intriguing world of a mysterious 20th century genius.

Born into a poor working-class Moscow family and trained as an artist in St. Petersburg, Filonov was part of the singular explosion of avant-garde art that blossomed in early 20th century Russia from the likes of Abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky, Supremacist Kasimir Malevich, Surrealist Marc Chagall and Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. But Filonov never stayed with any school except his own, which he called “analytical art.” It was in the eulogy to Filonov offered by the poet Alexei Kruchenykh, Futurism’s major theoretician, that the exhibition’s curators found their title, Witness of the Unseen.

Filonov’s analytical art wasn’t about mere technique. He took up Leonardo da Vinci’s belief that an artist should be more than just a mirror that “reflects objects without having any knowledge of them.” Filonov wanted to perceive and render the inner nature of things rather than their external appearances. The artist’s real objective, as Kruchenykh put it, was “to see through the world.” To achieve that, Filonov wrote to a young colleague back in 1940, “An artist must be a thoroughly educated analyst and researcher.”

Yet even if Filonov’s work is intellectually driven, his singular style marks it out, beginning with his palette. In works like the gloomy Feast of Kings (1913), as Kruchenykh noted, he used a peculiar combination of “bloody red and greenish brown”; for his optimistic and joyful painting with the Boratesque title Formula of the Universal Shift Into the World Blooming Through the Russian Revolution (1922), he mixed white and reddish pink in a way that is unmistakable.

So is his individual technique: when he dabbled in Cubism, as in his Flowers of the World Blooming (1915), he did so like no one else. “Picasso was preoccupied in Cubism with finding forms and artistic language to render an object,” maintains Avtonomova. “Filonov’s concern was that object’s philosophical core.” She sees Filonov as an artist-scholar who first defines a key idea, then gears his vision, palette and expression to that idea.

Filonov had an excellent command of naturalistic styles, obvious in portraits of his sisters Yevdokiya Glebova (1915) and Maria Filonova (1924). But he chose to develop his analytical art by experimenting in pure abstraction, as in his Formula series, which illustrated war, nature or the universe. Yet whichever style suited his purpose, Filonov always pursued it with an idiosyncratic intensity. Rather than starting with the big picture and filling in the details later, Filonov started with the details, which he called “atoms,” until the canvas or paper was full of painstakingly executed kaleidoscopic color cells. A pattern emerged organically as he linked each atom with its neighbors in a web of shapes and lines. “Each part of his every picture is a fulfilled picture by itself,” says Avtonomova.

While appreciating Filonov’s stunning technique, critics have sometimes had a harder time with his imagery. Many of his works are populated with dreadful faces or menacing animals. They often depict desperate figures against a grim industrial landscape, as in the Transformation of an Intellectual (Transformation of Man) (1914-15). Yet Filonov also could paint works brimming with optimism and beauty, such as Formula of Spring (1923) or Landscape (Formula of Spring) (1929).

Those extremes reflect his own life. In the relatively free and wildly fertile 1920s, Filonov’s reputation and artistic authority grew rapidly. He started lecturing and publishing theoretical works, and in 1925 he launched the Analytical Art School in Leningrad. Under Filonov’s guidance, some of his students presented an exhibition of analytical art in April 1927, and designed sets and costumes for a Leningrad performance of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General.

Filonov’s career peaked in late 1929, when the Russian Museum organized his personal exhibition — and crashed just weeks later in early 1930, when the authorities decided first not to open the exhibition to the public, and then to disband it altogether as undesirable. Filonov managed to present his works only twice more in collective Leningrad artists’ exhibits. Then Communist Party authorities orchestrated a vicious press campaign depicting him as a hostile element to the ideals of the revolution. Filonov became a nonperson in a country less interested in “analytical art” than in the triumphant certainties of Socialist Realism.

Though a sincere socialist, Filonov had too realistic a vision to be approved — or even accepted — by the Party and by his artistic peers loyal to the Party. He tried to fit in: he rechristened his Holy Family (1914) as Peasant Family. He painted and drew several masterpieces such as Tractor Workshop of the Putilov Iron Works (1932) and GOELRO (Lenin’s Electrification Plan) (1930). But though their titles were unassailably in tune with the times, even an average party commissar could discern in them an inherent and uncomfortable truthfulness. Unable to get commissions, Filonov lived in poverty, occasionally working on contracts that other people procured for him in their names. Foreign collectors would offer up to $25,000 — an astonishing sum in the late 1930s — to buy a piece, but the artist consistently turned them down. He wanted to keep his works together, and he never gave up the dream of a Museum of Analytical Art.

That is still a distant prospect, but Filonov’s place in the teeming history of early Soviet art has been secured. Back in 1988, the first Filonov show in 56 years was received mostly as a novelty. Now, Witness of the Unseen treats Filonov’s oeuvre as classic art that commands the same depth of regard that Filonov invested in it. His aesthetic achievements are enough to mark him out as an utter original. Behind them lurk the bittersweet discoveries of an artist who plunged deeply into human dejection even as he reached for a beauty all his own.