Word: artistically
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...keeps it well in check. This is, ultimately, a book about fathers and sons: Coyne must come to terms with his abusive father, and with the avenging ghost, who is the father of another key character. It's an appropriate enough theme for Hill, because every artist has to work in the shadow of his or her father-in-art, and symbolically, Oedipally overcome him, and in Hill's case his father-in-art is also his literal, biological father. Heart-Shaped Box isn't about appeasing fathers, and learning to love them, and seeing that they, too, are human...