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The Ideology of Analytic Art and the Principle of CraftednessAuthor(s): Pavel FilonovSource: Leonardo, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Summer, 1977), pp. 227-232Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1573431 .

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Leonardo, Vol. 10, pp. 227-232. Pergamon Press 1977. Printed in Great Britain.

THE IDEOLOGY OF ANALYTIC ART

AND THE PRINCIPLE OF

CRAFTEDN ESS*

Pavel Filonov (1883-1941)**

'Painting is the universally intelligible language of the artist.' A picture suggests a single conclusion, which sometimes cannot be translated into words, to the mind of its viewer. It is the result of the application of intellect and energy to materials from which it is made. A picture is the reflection or representation of phenomena of the outer and of the inner worlds in the way an artist understands these phenomena.

I am going to substitute the word 'craftedness' for the old- fashioned, muddled concept implicit in the word 'creative work' that, after all, in the context of picture-making means systematic and organized work with materials. As thought and labour, it is the organizational factor that transforms an artist's intellect into form, through correct and powerful analysis; the result, i.e. the artifact, whether in process of being crafted or complete, is, no matter what it depicts, a crystallization of the processess of thought. A picture is the expression of what has been going on inside the mind of its craftsman.

A person develops and improves through stufdy and persistent work-and this is the only way. The will to make things becomes most intense and effective when an artist has a specific understanding of the purpose of his own organizational work upon himself, of the aim he sets himself in the intellectual control of his own development and of the effect that he wishes to produce on the minds of other people. The first person to benefit from an object of art is its maker. He benefits both from the process of making it and from viewing it when it is finished. The viewer is the second person to benefit.

The process of working upon oneself at the same time as making an artifact and the desire to produce an effect on other minds soon become fundamental to the conception and satisfactory completion of a work. The more consciously an art work is undertaken, the more powerful an impact it will have on the viewer when it is finished. No matter what is the subject of a

picture, since craftedness reflects and fixes permanently in material form the struggle of humans to become a higher intellectual species and their struggle for existence as a species, this higher psychological characteristic of art affects viewers. To put it another way, art both raises us up and calls upon us to rise higher.

The craftsman either postulates (perhaps intuitively senses) a common aim in his own and in other people's development or he works on an authoritarian basis with a view to exerting an influence on viewers of his works. In the latter case. whatever may be the premises of an artist's work, his purpose in influencing viewers may be, quite consciously, to deceive and corrupt.

*Article published in rototype in the catalogue for the exhibition of Filonov's works at Novosibirsk, U.S.S.R., in 1967. M. Ya. Makarenko, ed., Pavel Filonov, Pervaya personal'naya Vystavka 1883-1941 (Novobirsk, U.S.S.R.: Akademgorodok, 1967). Translated from the original in Russian by Marjorie M. Farquharson in 1976. (Received 9 Dec. 1976.)

**Biographical information on this artist of the U.S.S.R. will be found in Annex I and Annex II of this Document.

The realist of the far right, the abstractionist of the left, and the different movements and craftsmen engaged in each and every way of working with materials-whether it be in art or in industry-are without exception working with the same, the one and only realistic form. There is no other form, nor can there be; form is indivisible and teaching about form should be integral. There is room for differentiation only in the ways in which form can be understood, in the purpose that art is intended to implement through effects on viewers and in the context, which is contained in form.

Since a picture, or an art work, is the result of some sort (it is not important of what sort) of psychic tension of the will on the part of the artist making it, the process of accomplishing this self- important task is an active one; that is, in the process of working upon materials a picture is crafted and crafted in such a way that each moment of its realization is an exact record, through and with materials, of the psychic process going on inside an artist. The completed object is a permanent record of the intellect of the artist who made it. From the completed work one can judge which elements of his psyche the maker activated, how he understood what he was depicting and how he made what he had understood, that is, the whole process of trying to understand and express through his craft.

Craftedness is the maximum exertion of inventive creation. The ability to craft is the ability to make material correspond to one's analytic thought and to display the intended content.

A creative artist cannot operate with an old familiar form. This obliges him to invent form so that in the completed artifact the form corresponds to the result of his analysis: like a sound, a note of music, a letter, a word, speech-as flexible as dialectics. A creative artist is obliged constantly to invent form. Then invention of form will be a sine qua non of the efficacity of his work. Then science, not scholaticism, will become an inalienable part of the process of painting and it will be possible to establish an integral criterion, but until this stage has been reached, artists are left with the principle of 'absolute exactness' and the 'biological' craftedness of a picture [1].

The science of art can be reduced to the skill and system that enable an artist to represent in visual form any content that he has intellectually assimilated and understood; therefore art can, in certain cases, be the result of schooling and, in other cases, be the result of a person's ability to work without any schooling whatever.

In my art, form is conditioned by the concept of content. During the process of the development of form, the supreme artistic significance of form is conditioned by the analytical development of the concept of conten't. Form is the visual expression of content, through material. Content is the form, that is, the meaning behind form and form or meaning is content or, in other words, that power by which a picture conveys something to viewers.

In my understanding of art, the form of a picture is inseparable from its content. Form and content are one whole and, in this sense, there is no such thing as formalism-for there is always content, albeit variously edited by artists [2].

It is essential to seek an effect through colour, simultaneously

227

1



Pavel Filonovt

seeking the effect through form, so that from the professional point of view, the whole process of work should be reduced to seeking an effect through the invention of form-and thus through the expression of content. The only check and criterion of the effect achieved through colour is the maximum intensity of effect through form, that is, the degree in which the artist succeeds in putting across a visual expression of content.

The concept of form in a work dictates the understanding of colour-the degree of strength and intensity of the colour. Content and form are not to be thought of as opposing principles; rather the one conditions the development, given features, particularities, quality and density of the other; essentially they are an indivisible whole.

Texture is a concept that involves the significance of the properties of the surface of one material in juxtaposition with the consistency of other materials used in the making of a picture: texture is the result of the method of applying paint.

The subject is the principle content to be introduced into a picture: it is, as it were, the main clause of content among other complementary subordinate clauses.

Drawing of form, and drawing in the sense of manipulating form, is crafted form at its most intensive. A drawing shows the most characteristic features and particularities of a form or of a complex of forms in their separateness or unity, with clear delineations between the separate elements that compose its structure or that are composed by its structure.

Painting is form and the consistency from which form is composed is rendered most intense when crafted with the help of colour. As a process of work that uses colour, painting is the same process as drawing. The quality of a painting, however, is determined by the intensity, the craftedness of colour.

Rhythm is the illusory balance of movement and of consistency in the form and the colour of the object depicted in a picture. It is achieved only though the most persistent crafting; in the professional sense of the word, this is the only possible 'rhythm' in the art of painting.

The basis of my art (that which, above all, I observe, study and seek to manifest in my works) is the study of man-his intellectual, class and biological characteristics and peculiarities; the thought and the life processes that go on within him. I try to notice the signs of his intellectual development and biological evolution and to understand their deciding factors, laws and interrelationships, beginning with the environment in which he is active and ending with the aim towards which his actions are orientated. Furthermore, I am interested in the possibility of artificially speeding up the improvement of the human intellect, of the organization of being, of world outlook, of class orientation and of mankind's struggle with nature and struggle for its beliefs. (Figs. 1 to 8 and Fig. 9 (cf. colour plate)).

I reject absolutely as unscientific all artistic creeds in painting from that of the extreme right to that of Suprematism and Constructivism. Not one of their leaders knew how to paint, to

draw or to think analytically about 'what? how'? and why?' he was painting.

I declare Picasso's 'reformation' to be scholastically superficial and essentially bereft of revolutionary significance. I declare that there are two methods of approaching an object and of resolving the problems it poses: the unbiased, analytical approach and the scientific approach based on intuition but constantly checked by analysis [3]. I maintain that the criterion of an artist's ideology and the ideology that informs his pictures. their construction. form, colour and texture should be on the same level as the scientific thought and ideology of his own time, or should anticipate future levels.

'Realism' is a scholastic tendency to abstract from a real object only two of its predicates: shape and colour. To speculate in these

Fig. 2. Untitled, watercolour, 23 x 16 cm, 1914/15.

Fig. 1. 'East and West', oil on paper, 40 x45.5 cm, 1912/13.

Ig I ICt ar Ir . 4 - I I -r

Fig. 3. 'Carters', watercolour, 42 x 52 cm, 1915.

228



The Ideology of Analytic Art and the Principle of Craftedness

is art for art's sake. I find speculation in precisely 'these two predicates' to be a general characteristic of the 'right-left' sects and call it 'essentially realistic'. Realism itself I term obsolete scholaticism.

There is no valid reason for realists to divide up into movements, take refuge in Abstractionism. apples. space, Cubo- Futurism. contre-relicf. experiment. the proletariat. Tatlin's tower. or to provide all this with verbal justification by making a philosophy of abstraction, an anecdote of colour. Analysis shows that among realists there is the same old speculation in the two predicates of Realism-only that each faction has its own way of spelling 'Realism' and because of this, an artist often fails to see a whole world of phenomena, that is, life as it is. He knows neither phenomena nor himself. His ability to analyze, his

intuition, his powers of critical thought and his personal initiative he has deliberately allowed to atrophy: professionally, he is an illiterate. He is mummified in a scholastic philosophy of 'representational form' and 'non-representational form'. He has elevated all this into a ritual; in different ways, he preaches one and the same craftedness of the same two predicates of shape and colour.

Since I know, adduce by analysis, see and intuitively feel that any object is possessed not just of these two predicates but of a whole range of visible and invisible predicates (their emanations, reactions, component parts, geneses, their being, their manifest or secret qualities), so I utterly reject contemporary Realism's doctrine of the 'two predicates' and its right-left sects as unscientific and dead. In its place I put scientific, analytic, intuitive Naturalism: the initiative of the artist who is prepared to investigate the many predicates of an object, the range of phenomena in the world, the phenomena and processes going on in humans, whether or not visible to the naked eye, and the persistence of the craftsman-inventor who follows the principle of the 'biologically crafted picture'.

I repudiate the Dark Kingdom [4] of contemporary Russian art criticism, which is a scandal before science and the proletarian way of life. It is at present considered 'bad taste' to write about the right wing (why?) and at the same time the left wing is subject to boycott by these critics who have never studied it and are not even ashamed of the fact that they know nothing and have no scientific data upon which to base a study.

The Russian art of icon painting was first reduced to scholaticism on a large scale when it was injected with Byzantine concepts of form, colour and aesthetics. Then it was further scholasticized by clerics at the Moscow Church councils. Then the populist movement of the Ambulants was scholasticized by The World of Art and, finally, finished off by Benois [5]-and all in the name of the 'two predicates' of Realism. This was how a minor offshoot of French art in Russia (Hellenism) developed via

Fig. 4. 'Man and Woman', watercolour. 21 x 23 cm, 1912/18.

Fig. 6. 'The Underworld', Indian ink, 17 x 10 cm, 1923/24.

229

Fig. 5. 'Two Heads', oil on paper, 58 x 56 cm, 1920.



Pavel Filonov

Suprematist-Constructionism into the same routine of the 'two predicates' and came to be called the 'mainstream of Russian art'.

I would define Russian art, in the mass, as an exclusive variety of European art, in the mass, on account of its specific textural peculiarities: weight, moisture, an unbiased approach to texture and an organic conception of aesthetics.

It is a characteristic sign that an artist achieves what he is after by his own gut-reaction and not by any canon. Here the spirit of the craftsman enters dynamically into the material of the object he is making and, as a subconscious and conscious rejection of canons, dominates the condition of representation.

The French school [6], in the mass, is the realism of the 'two predicates' and a speculative concept of aesthetics. The Russian school, in the mass, is the Realism of the 'two predicates', plus an organic concept of aesthetics and an elemental, instinctual departure from the canon (cf. Courbet, Cezanne to Surikov, Savitsky). This is the source of the concept of a chronological tradition in a specifically Russian mainstream of left world art.

It is precisely for these reasons that I reject the contemporary concept of the mainstream of the Russian tradition and offer my own: the Ambulants, Surikov, Savitsky, 'The Jack of Diamonds', 'The Donkey's Tail', 'Luchism', Malevich and the Bourliuks, Cubo-Futurism, my own works (my theoretical assumptions about pure active form and the transference [between 1915 and 1925] of the centre of gravity in art to Russia), Suprematism, Mansurov, my present (repeated) opposition to Realism [7].

I do not accept the 'Literary Textbooks' on this question issued by European and Russian criticism and written in the name of the 'two predicates'.

I am not making a rule or setting up a school (I completely deny the value of any such approach). Instead, I offer as a foundation my own purely scientific method, which is one that anybody can use.

May the first world revolution take place in the minds of artists and in art.

NOTES ON TRANSLATION

1. By 'absolute exactness' Filonov meant that an artist should not aim at producing a general impression of light, shape and colour (as in impressionist painting, to which he was ardently opposed), but should accord equal importance to each part of the surface of a canvas and each part should correspond exactly to one of the 'predicates' of the subject of the picture: 'predicates' that the artist adduces by concentrated analysis and by intuition, the intuitive process being, however, constantly checked by the analytical. To achieve this

'absolutely exact' correspondence between the artist's thought and its visual representation, he forbade the use by his pupils of approximate effects, preferring them to work in hard pencil and with small paint brushes in clear, primary colours.

The concept of 'biological craftedness' contains, like Filonov's painting itself, the idea of expressing the process of evolution through the making of artifacts. By recording man's thoughtful analysis of living things against the background of their inanimate environment, Filonov sought to assert the fitness, supremacy and, above all, the potential of humanity as a species amongst other species. This potential, he considered, was demonstrated by the very fact of man's ability to 'craft' or to 'make' (it will be remembered that at the beginning of this article he expressly disclaims the more pretentious word to 'create'). At the same time, the 'religious' intensity of his work is rooted in his belief in the capacity of the individual and of the species not only to improve but to transcend themselves. Yet he thought of himself as an atheist and avoided the language of metaphysics. His ideas were rooted in biological theory and he was constantly aware of humans as just another life form, the highest branch, not yet full grown, on the genealogical 'tree of life'. He tried not only to express this idea in his pictures, but to demonstrate it through the process of crafting. Thus the fundamental, 'absolutely exact' unit of his pictures may be compared to a living embryo capable of the most complex development and it is this attempt to convey the essentially temporal concept of growth and evolution in pictorial terms that Filonov had in mind when he wrote of 'biological craftedness'.

2. What Filonov means is that any picture, non-realistic or realistic, if it achieves a degree of intensity that in his view alone qualifies it to rank as a work of art, expresses the thought of the artist, however the artist may have elected to interpret his thought in terms of his craft, that is, to 'edit' it.

3. This is a free translation from the Russian text that reads, according to the rototype copy from which the translation was made and which contains a number of misprints: 'absolyutno nauchnyy, absolyutno prebyvayushchiy analiticheski intuitivnym'.

4. 'Dark Kingdom' was the name given by 19th-century critics to the brutal, obscurantist world of the Russian merchant and artisan class as depicted in Ostrovsky's plays.

5. The World of Art was originally the name of an art magazine founded by Sergey Dyagilev in 1899. It continued publication for six years (till autumn 1904). was actively critical of the Ambulants and arranged several exhibitions to introduce the public to West European and Russian 'modernism', a loose term that covered pre-Raphaelite, impressionist and symbolist painting as well as the characteristic art noveau style. Aleksandr Benois (1870-1960) was a leader of the 'World of Art' group, an artist, critic and scholar who founded the fine antiquarian journal Starye Gody (1907-1916). He was a representative of the European influence and emigrated to Paris after the revolution.

Fig. 7. Untitled, Indian ink, 30.5 x 27 cm, 1924/25.

230

Fig. 8. Untitled, oil on canvas, 78 x 98.5 cm, 1923.



The Ideology of Analytic Art and the Principle of Craftedness

6. Filonov used the term 'school' loosely. His meaning would perhaps be better conveyed by: 'The greater part of French painting'. . 'the greater part of Russian painting.'

7. Neither Filonov's punctuation nor his thought is quite clear

from the document as it stands. His chronological list of individual artists and movements is interrupted by the introduction of ideas of 'active form' and the shift of the centre of gravity in art in Russia, which the translator has taken the liberty of putting in brackets.

ANNEX I

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON PAVEL FILONOV (1883-1941)

Kirill Sokolov*

Pavel Filonov (born Moscow 8 Jan. 1883-died Leningrad 3 Dec. 1941) is an important yet still little known representative of 'the alternative tradition' in modern Russian art. The intensity of his painting is rooted in intellectualized intuitive attempts to depict the interrelatedness of the life process, of which Filonov sees art itself as an organic part. He goes back to the roots of art (for himself this meant primarily the Scandinavian, Siberian and Russian primitives) and to the biological roots of existence, seeking to depict a 'universal flowering' of ever more complex and perfect forms 'in the process of evolution'.

1. Selected chronology 1910: Participated in the First Union of Youth

Exhibition at St. Petersburg. 1911-12: Tramping and odd-jobbing through Italy (where

he could not raise the entrance money to the Sistine Chapel) and France. (Only previous trip abroad was to Jerusalem via South Russia.)

1912: Participated in 'The Donkey's Tail' Exhibition at Moscos.

1913: Together with losif Shkol'nik and Rozanova, designed the decor for Mayakovsky's tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsk v.

1913-14: Exhibited 'The Feast of Kings' and other works at the Union of Youth Exhibition.

1914: Publication in St. Petersburg of Ryakushchiv Parnas, a collection of futurist poetry, illustrated by Filonov, and of Velimir Khlebnikov's Izbornik stikhov with Filonov's illustrations and specially designed calligraphy for the litho- graphic supplement Derevyanvye Idoly.

1915: Publication in Petrograd of Filonov's futurist poem Propoven o prorosli mirovoi (The Song of Universal Flowering), illustrated by the author.

1916-1918: Served in World War I. 1918-27: Worked as administrator and teacher in the

Academy of Arts and the Petrograd branch of the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture.

1919: Participated in the First Free Exhibition of Works of Art at The Winter Palace, Petrograd.

1921: Participated in the Third Periodical Exhibition of the Artists' Commune at Petrograd.

1922: Exhibition of painting and sculpture in the garden of the Narodnyy Dom at Petrograd.

1922: Participated in the Fifth Exhibition of the Artists' Commune at Petrograd.

1922: Participated in the First Russian Artistic Exhibition in the Van Diemen Gallery at Berlin.

1922: Participated in the Russian Exhibition in Holland.

1923: Participated in the Exhibition of Pictures by Petrograd Artists of All Trends 1918. 1923 in the Academy of Arts at Petrograd.

1925: Filonov's students took the name of The Collective of Masters of Analytical Art. Filonov himself came under increasingly virulent attack from art critics.

1930-31: One-man exhibition of over 300 pictures mounted at the Russian Museum in Leningrad. After a long controversy, the exhibition was taken down without having been opened to the public.

1932: Participated in the anniversary exhibition of Artists of the R.S.F.S.R. over the Last 15 Years in the State Russian Museum at Leningrad.

1932: Participated in the exhibiton of Artists of the R.S.F.S.R. over the last 15 years at Moscow (Red Square).

1933: Participated in the Portraits Exhibition in the Province's House of the Artist at Leningrad.

1933: Participated in an exhibition of pictures in the Province's House of the Artist at Leningrad.

1933: Participated in the exhibition of works by tourist-artists in the M. Gorky House of Scholars at Leningrad.

1933: Publication at Leningrad of Kalevala, illustrated by Filonov's.students under his supervision.

1934: Filonov contributed to an offical exhibition for the last time until the year of his death in 1941.

1941: March/April. Participated in the Exhibition of Painting and Sculptures of the City Committee of Artists at Leningrad.

2. Bibliography C. Grey, The Great Experiment. Russian Art 1863-1922 (New

York: Abrams, 1962) pp. 98, 182-84; R. Milner-Gulland, in Oxford Slavonic Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) plates Nos. 131, 132; J. E. Bowlt, Pavel Filonov, Studio Int. 186, 30 (July-Aug 1973) also Pavel Filonov: His Painting and His Theory, Russian Rev. 34, 282 (July 1975) and Paul Filonov: An Alternative Tradition?, Art J. 34, 208 (Spring 1975).

The monograph in Czech by Jan Kriz entitled Pavel Nikolayevich Filonov (Prague: Nakladatelstvi ceskoslovenskych vytvarnych umelc4, 1966) has introductions to Filonov's work in German and French with 40 black and white and 12 colour reproductions of works executed between 1912 and 1930.

INEX II

ESSAY ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF PAVEL FILONOV (1883-1941)

Oleg Prokofiev**

Ten years have passed since I heard from friends that an exhibition of Pavel Nickolayevich Filonov's works was opening at the Club of the Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow. It had been brought there from Novosibirsk [cf. footnote on page 227].

*Soviet artist-painter. Temporary address: c/o Leonardo, Pergamon Press Ltd. Headington Hill Hall, Oxford OX3 OBW, England. (Received 9 Dec. 1976.)

Who was Filonov? The name was little known in the recent history of Russian art. At a time when the scene was dominated by representatives of Socialist Realism, a few solitary non- conformists like Filonov, had struggled through adverse circumstances. I had heard of him by word of mouth from artists

**Soviet artist-painter living at 16 Hyde Vale, Greenwich, England. Based on a translation from the original in Russian by Marjorie M. Farquharson in 1976. (Received 9 Dec. 1976.)

231



Pavel Filonov

of the older generation and had seen one or two of his paintings stored in a museum [1].

The 1967 exhibition was held in a small gallery and Filonov's paintings, drawings and watercolours were hung in several tiers. At last, despite the long suppression of his works (I believe that few, if any, are on show at present, though his name appears with increasing frequency in print), the works of Filonov were being made available to a wider public.

Do the bleak figures of Filonov's paintings have a place in the history of 20th-century art? It is very hard to fit him into any scheme of Russia's artistic development. One could briefly define his development as follows: Filonov began painting within a fi-amework of definite symbolical associations and made the transition towards a peculiar and original mythologized urban allegorism, expanding the frontiers of his own vision as a result of contact with surrealist and non-figurative works. But I want to get away from this kind of generalization and to recall another personal discovery I made at the exhibition.

The movement of the crowd filing slowly past the closely hung pictures forced me to look at them close up and I was struck, particularly in some of his graphic works, by the fact that the simplest structural elements fundamental to the composition as a whole, were essentially derived from Suprematism. The suprematist approach to composition was modified so that the picture should not be viewed as bounded by its edges.

Filonov tried to understand the vast complexity of material reality. In this context an incident that took place during his time at the academy of Arts is interesting (and characteristic).

With unusual persistence Filonov tried three times to get into the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and in 1903 he was finally accepted, but 'exclusively for his knowledge of anatomy'. However, two years later he was expelled, in the words of the rector, 'for corrupting his colleagues through his works'. Filonov wrote a long letter of protest, in which he said that he had been expelled because he persistently strove 'to achieve an exact depiction of each separate form at the expense of beauty and of colour' and that he could have attained 'an absolute closeness to nature' had he been allowed to work as he wanted and to reproduce shapes as he saw them. Had he been allowed to work thus. he claimed, 'one study would have kept me busy for three months'. The world is infinitely complex, but, in order adequately to reflect some of its complexity, the 'creative will' of an artist must be attuned to 'a maximum concentration of power to depict'. I could cite examples from Filonov's writings in support of this idea, but I would rather direct attention to two fundamental concepts that Filonov stressed. These are his 'principle of craftedness' and his call for 'a scientific approach' [cf Filonov's article, above]. Filonov sometimes appears obsessed with the idea of a scientific approach to art.

The principle of craftedness is related to the idea of'work with materials' and 'the continuous process' of 'a tense control of form'. This demands 'the scientific organization of craftedness' and is achieved through scientific, analytic, intuitive naturalism'. Now, although Filonov here brings in a number of complex problems to do with texture, rhythm, etc., from my point of view the most important part of his article is that in which he speaks of 'examining all predicates of an object'.

Filonov speaks out sharply against what he calls 'the scholastic abstraction of only two of an object's predicates: form and colour' [cf. Filonov's article above]. Hence his rejection of the particular French school of art that, in his opinion, takes into account exclusively the form and colour of objects. It is interesting to compare this with the critical position held by Marcel Duchamp, a contemporary of Filonov. Duchamp objected to the dominance in French art of what he called 'retinal' art, i.e. art that is intended only for the visual response of the eyes- which began with Courbet [P. Sabane, Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp in Documents of 20th-century Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971) p. 43].

The influence of French 'retinal' art in Russian art was very strong and Filonov rejected it as 'Hellenism'. In his view, Russian art has some exceptional quality that distinguishes it from West

European art-it has different 'specific' textural peculiarities- 'weight, moisture and an unbiassed approach to texture'. Filonov accused what he calls 'the French school' of having a 'speculative aesthetic' and contrasted this with the efforts of what he calls 'the Russian school' to achieve an 'organic concept of aesthetics and an elemental, instinctual departure from artistic canons'. To grasp the full significance of Filonov's reaction, it is necessary to understand the great influence that art in France, from the impressionists and Cezanne to Picasso, had in pre- revolutionary Russia. With regard to the last of these, Filonov's remarks are uncompromising in the extreme.

It is interesting that, naming his favourite 19th-century Russian artists, Filonov speaks of Surikov and Savitsky, two typical representatives of the Ambulants, two artists united by one passion: to portray people in the mass; the crowd organized by a single common movement, activity or event.

In Russia, interest in such mass scenes is linked with the dramatic cataclysms of history: invasions, wars, resettlements and deportations. In a period of revolutions and wars, Filonov reflected the events that were shaking his country and its culture to their foundations.

Filonov conveyed the tragic aspect of life for some people during his time. He himself was a man of ascetic temperament, a true recluse. He was unswervingly committed to his ideas on what (without revolutionary pretensions) he called 'analytic art'. In the 1930's, when a general idealogical simplification had established its domination, Filonov continued to dream of founding a museum of analytic art. He inevitably came into conflict with the changed trends. I believe that the last time he exhibited, until the year of his death, was in July 1933 [2]. Filonov died of starvation during the blockade of Leningrad on 3 Dec. 1941, having contributed in March/April of that year to an exhibition of painting and sculpture of the Leningrad City Committee of Artists. Officially, he was almost forgotten for the next 20 years.

Filonov had a number of disciples, yet he was a solitary figure and he pursued his way quite independently amongst the movements of that period: Suprematism, Constructivism, Socialist Realism. He had certain, somehow unexpected, affinities with folk art. This yearning for the primitive coexisted with a certain intellectual refinement. His peasants, who resemble figures on popular prints, appear to dream gloomily of a vanished idyll, their expressions thoughtful, often suggestive of the sombre anguish of trapped animals. Heraldic animals restlessly roam about in the newly arisen Babylons of infernal urban landscapes. Yet, the austere, almost ornamental 'tapestry' of these fantastical and feverish worlds retains an overall order without which one would not be able to cope with the impact of his works [3].

It is my view that Filonov has broadened the artistic vision of the world and expanded and refined the expressive resources of 20th-century painting. It is true that sometimes it seems as if he lacked the time and probably even the desire to think of a synthesis. Or perhaps Filonov thought of himself, as Cezanne did at the end of the 19th century, as a 'primitive of the new art'

NOTES

1. In 1961, Nikolay Khardzhiev arranged an exhibition of graphic works by Filonov and Matyushin at the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow. (K. Sokolov, ed.)

2. J. E. Bowlt cites a letter of 19 Aug. 1973 from Yulia Arapovic, an ex-pupil of Filonov, stating that Filonov had a one-man show in 1935 or 1936. Presumably, this was of a private nature, as it was not documented [cf. J. E. Bowlt, Russian Rev. 34, 291 (No. 3, July 1975) Note 16]. (K. Sokolov, ed.)

3. Filonov, according to his pupils, could begin a picture in any corner, gradually adding one compositional element to another, building up the whole bit by bit and, as it were, reproducing the process of a complex series of metamor- phoses or, as he himself puts it 'the process of growth and development'. (K. Sokolov, ed.)

232



Top left: Pavel Filonov. 'Animals', oil on paper, 35.4 x 43 cm, 1925/26. (Fig. 9. cf. page 228.)

Top right: Scott Regan. 'St. Acquin', polarized light painting, cellophane, cellulose tape, plastic sheet material, Plexiglas, polarizers, 31 x 25 cm, 1975. (Photo: G. W. Burgess, Mexico, N.Y., U.S.A.) (Fig. 1, cf. page 213.) Bottom left: Diana Shaffer. 'Installation No. 3', sculptural environment, wood, gypsum board, oil paint, fluorescent light tubes, 1975. View of triangular plaque from room entrance. (Fig. 3, cf. page 224.) Bottom right: Paul Franck. 'Combat', oil on canvas, 75 x 150 cm, 1942. (Fig. 2, cf. page 219.)

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[facing page 226]



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