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