It is impossible to know what would have happened with Soviet art had the Stalinist clampdown of the 1930s never taken place. But we have some tantalizing clues in the diverse styles, schools and movements that flourished after the Revolution. Budding artists at the time had plenty of role models to choose from: Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin or Marc Chagall, with their life-affirming humanism; Kasimir Malevich, with his cool, cerebral Suprematism; or Vladimir Tatlin and the Constructivists, with their utopian designs.
And then there's the strange case of Pavel Filonov. An influential painter in the '20s, Filonov developed a unique style that makes his work instantly recognizable next to that of his contemporaries. His canvases, sometimes populated with grotesque human faces or menacing animals, are inevitably crisscrossed with a kaleidoscopic web of shapes, lines and colors.
The amount of detail is often so staggering that it suggests dementia. Now, Muscovites have a chance to see Filonov in all his demented glory. "Pavel Filonov: Witness of the Unseen," a major retrospective featuring about 140 of his paintings and graphics, opened at the Museum of Private Collections on Tuesday.
The exhibition came to Moscow from the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, where it was unveiled this summer as part of the cultural program of the G8 summit. The show is largely a repeat of the landmark 1988 exhibition that brought Filonov's paintings to light after decades in storage.
Yevgenia Petrova, deputy director of the Russian Museum, explained at a Tuesday news conference that the time was ripe to show Filonov again. In the late '80s, she recalled, museum-goers were saturated with one blockbuster exhibition after another, featuring long-suppressed modernists like Malevich and Chagall, so Filonov got less attention than he deserved. Also, she added, researchers had made progress in cataloguing Filonov's works and grasping his ideas.
"Things have become a little clearer than they were 20 years ago," Petrova said. "But much still remains mysterious." Filonov was born in 1883 to a working-class family in Moscow, but his parents died while he was young and he moved in with relatives in St.
Petersburg. He became active in the art scene, studying for a while at the city's Academy of Arts and participating in exhibitions with other young painters. In 1912, he wrote a manifesto that turned the usual approach to painting on its head.
He argued that instead of starting with the big picture and filling in the details later, painters should do the opposite and start with the details, which he called "atoms." Then they should proceed piecemeal until the entire canvas was full. An overall pattern would emerge organically as the painter linked each atom with its neighbors.
Filonov felt this approach would bring visual art closer to the real nature of things, as opposed to representations of their external appearances. He called it "Analytical Art" and followed its principles throughout his career.
"
They often depict people with weirdly distended limbs or faces, while the backdrops can have the feel of grim industrial nightmares. "Degradation of an Intellectual (Degradation of a Man)" from 1914-15 features a man standing in front of a warped cityscape; dressed in a grimy suit, he has three leering faces and 10 or so grasping hands. In later works, Filonov moved further into abstraction, like in his "Formula" series, which were meant to illustrate ambitious themes like war, the seasons or the universe.
As his reputation grew, Filonov became an teacher as well as a practitioner. In the '20s, scores of followers listened to his lectures on Analytical Art. Filonov evaluated their works based on the notion of "madeness," or zdelannost, a criterion he invented himself that had to do with the degree of detail and granularity in a piece of art.
Filonov's career peaked in 1929, when the Russian Museum organized a personal exhibition of his works, something he had long hoped for. But following an abrupt change of management at the museum, and orders that museums had to focus on "political enlightenment," the exhibition was never opened to the general public. The painter became the target of attacks in the press, and in 1932 his school of Analytical Art was dissolved, along with all other independent art collectives, when the official Artists' Union became the only legally sanctioned body of artists in the country.
Unable to get commissions, Filonov spent the '30s in poverty. Although collectors occasionally tried to buy his paintings, he always refused to sell because he wanted to keep his works together -- he never gave up on the idea that there would one day be a museum of Analytical Art. As was often the case with Stalin-era repressions, the persecution of Filonov was ironic because the painter was essentially sympathetic to Soviet ideals.
He had welcomed the Revolution, which took place while he was serving in the army during World War I, and his fellow soldiers had even chosen him to lead a revolutionary military tribunal.
The transformation can be seen in his paintings: Some of his earlier ones depict biblical motifs, such as the Nativity, but the later ones focus on themes like Lenin, electrification and the triumph of the proletariat. Still, he retained a tendency toward mysticism. Tatyana Glebova, a student of his who went on to become a successful book illustrator, wrote in her memoirs: "It seems to me that Filonov artificially forced himself to adopt the atheist position, although this was completely antithetical to his outlook on life.
He did this because he got caught up in the Revolution, because he idealized the proletariat and saw in it the same moral qualities he had in himself, in precisely the same way he saw his talents reflected in his students, although they imitated him poorly. But the strength of his convictions was strong." Filonov escaped being arrested himself, but he died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad in 1941.
His sister saved his paintings and eventually donated them to the Russian Museum, where they remained in storage until perestroika. Filonov was little known before 1988, and even now he hardly has the celebrity status of Malevich or Tatlin, though he rivaled them in influence in the '20s. In part, this was his own doing -- he repeatedly declined to have his works taken abroad for exhibitions, reasoning that they ought to be shown in Russia first, and never giving up his idea of a museum of Analytical Art.
In contrast, Malevich left a number of his pieces in Germany after exhibiting there, which helped guarantee him a place in art history. Filonov ended up as a singular figure in art -- a sort of visionary oddball suspended in time, with no connection to any movement before or after. And his lifelong dream, a museum of Analytical Art, never got off the ground.
The new retrospective, however, offers some idea of what such a museum would have been like. Spread across seven spacious halls, it thoroughly immerses the visitor in Filonov's work. The experience is also enhanced by music coming from an early electronic instrument called the ANS.
Designed in 1938 by the engineer Yevgeny Murzin, the ANS scans an image and turns the visual patterns into sound (not unlike a fax machine), creating an irregular hum that would probably go well on a sci-fi soundtrack. The exhibition organizers have rigged the ANS to scan a Filonov picture, so when you're walking around the museum and looking at the paintings, you're not just seeing Filonov's art, but hearing it, too. "Pavel Filonov: Witness of the Unseen" (Pavel Filonov: Ochevidets Nezrimogo) runs to Feb.
11 at the Museum of Private Collections, located at 10 Ulitsa Volkhonka. Metro Kropotkinskaya. Tel.
203-7998.
News RSS