Pavel Filonov (1883–1941)

Filonov P. Peasant Family (The Holy Family). 1914

Pavel Filonov’s Peasant Family (The Holy Family) belongs to his Towards a Universal Blooming cycle of paintings. By the term “universal blooming”, the artist implied a single front that would reveal and realize common human values, with the spiritual role of the artist as its constituent element. Filonov called himself an “artist of the universal blooming” and conceived every painting as an independent and organic development of artistic forms.

Like other contemporaries, Pavel Filonov addresses canonic subjects from the New Testament, confirming the eternal nature and the philosophical importance of certain situations.

Filonov P. The German War. 1915

Painted during the First World War, Pavel Filonov’s The German War is stylistically similar to two other compositions — Untitled (1917) and Untitled (1919). It also has much in common with the Cubo-Futurist works of Kazimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova and Nadezhda Udaltsova.
The picture is painted in restrained grey-brown tones and divines the contours of Filonov’s future works. Following the artist’s desire to convey the dynamics and chaos of destruction, the forms break up into “splinters”, reuniting in crystals and new variations.