Pavel filonov exhibition stand

1940

Countenances (Faces on an Icon)

One of Filonov's last works, Countenances is a finely detailed, semi-abstracted image, in which two sets of eyes peer out at the viewer from a dense web of interconnected colored dots, lines, and shapes.

He proposed an art that activated what he called the "knowing eye"; that is, one informed by a combination of intuition and knowledge. Filonov died a few months before his wife, on December 3, 1941, one of millions to starve to death during the Nazi Siege of Leningrad. The artist was an opponent of urbanism and resisted "machinated" civilization.

As Historian and curator Evgenii Kovtun explains, Filonov "renders the invisible not through the visible, as the Realists and Cubists do, but through novel plastic solutions.

Baily states, "With little evidence to the contrary, Filonov's portrait has been explained as an unsuccessful attempt to curry favour with Stalin's regime by producing an official portrait of the ruler".

However, for many years they were kept in storage and visitors were not allowed to see them. In its place I propose a scientific, analytical and intuitive naturalism: the observer's acknowledgment of all of the object's predicates, all the parameters of its entire world, and also the characteristics of human processes, both seen and unseen by the naked eye".

He may be art history's most brilliant doodler, with repetitive geometric patterns and haphazardly arranged figures of varying scale [...] that grow from his stream-of-consciousness technique. Art critic Robert Chandler notes, however, that Filonov was "dismayed by their new bourgeois comfort" and chose to sleep on the floor and earned his own money by taking odd jobs house painting.

Education and Early Career

Filonov's siblings recognized his innate talent for painting and encouraged him to study art.

And each particle was given a unique shape used by Filonov.

The elements of the paintings gathered in digital streams are an attempt to discover contrasting compounds in Filonov: organic and inorganic, human and inhuman, dead and alive. Between 1903 and 1908, Filonov studied at the private studio of illustrator Lev Dmitriev-Kavkazski.

Parental responsibilities then passed to his beloved eldest sister. The following year he joined the Russian Revolution and served as the Chairman of the Revolutionary War Committee of Dunay (a small area in the Gulf of Peter the Great). This vision is enhanced by the vibrant colors used throughout the work, with deep jewel-like reds, greens, and blues dominating.

Here the artist used a fine brush and worked his way carefully over the surface of the canvas, deliberately and intentionally placing each point of color as he went. Filonov's obsessive detail work and the worm-eaten complexion of his subjects have led to comparisons to Ivan Albright, but the chaos and spontaneity of his structure and color schemes make him a unique phenomenon and yield rich material for future exhibition and study".

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Pavel Filonov