Pavel Filonov

Pavel Filonov was a painter, theorist and poet of the Russian avant-garde, working under the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. Born in Moscow in 1883, he developed a style that stands between Cubism, Futurism and a personal approach he called analytical realism. He matters chiefly for insisting on painting built up from small details, and for keeping to that method until the end of his life, despite official indifference and censorship.

In 1897 he moved to St Petersburg, where he began studying art. He entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1908 but was expelled in 1910. During those years he belonged to the Union of Youth, a circle founded by Elena Guro and Mikhail Matyushin, which he was part of between 1910 and 1914. In 1912 he published The Canon and the Law, in which he set out his principles. Where Cubism represented objects through the geometry of their surfaces, analytical realism, he argued, should represent them through their inner essence. Between 1913 and 1915 he worked closely with Russian Futurists and illustrated texts by Velimir Khlebnikov together with Kazimir Malevich.

He served in the First World War on the Romanian front. After the Revolution, he took part in a free exhibition at the Hermitage in 1919, and by 1923 he was teaching at the Academy and sat on the INKhUK. There he led a group of followers, the Masters of Analytical Realism, which grew to more than seventy members. In 1929, however, the Soviet government blocked a planned retrospective at the Russian Museum. From 1932 he lived in severe poverty, refusing to sell his paintings to private buyers because he hoped to give them to the museum. He died of starvation in Leningrad in December 1941, during the siege.

Much of his work survived thanks to his sister, Yevdokiya Glebova, who kept the paintings and eventually donated them. Exhibitions were allowed again slowly, beginning with a show in Novosibirsk in 1967 and an official display at the Russian Museum in 1988. Today he is regarded as a singular figure of the Russian avant-garde, whose influence is traced in Suprematism and Expressionism.