Word: filonov
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...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...
...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...
...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...