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Filonov Pavel
(1883 - 1941)
Pavel Nikolaevich Filonov was born on January 8, 1883 in Moscow, the sixth child of a cabman. His father died in 1887, and his mother became a laundress to support her large family. The children worked too, even Pavel, the youngest, helped his sisters to embroider towels and sell them in the marketplace.
At the age of 6 Pavel began to dance in the corps de ballet in small Moscow theatres to earn a living. In 1896, his mother died. By this time Pavel¡¯s elder sister, Alexandra, was married to a well-to-do engineer. Her husband took all his in-laws to St. Petersburg and gave them all a decent education.
Pavel, who had shown interest in painting already at the age of 3-4 years old, began to study art and crafts at the School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. As his main trade, he studied house decoration, to become an ornament and stucco molding painter, while also attending evening drawing classes. In 1901, Filonov graduated from the school with the diploma of master-painter and worked at different jobs, from wall coloring to the restoration of plafonds in the Hermitage. In 1903 Filonov tried to enter the Academy of Arts but failed at the entrance examinations. He entered the private studio of the academician L. Dmitriev-Kavkazsky, and studied there for 5 years. During that period Filonov attempted to enroll at the Academy three times, but never succeeded. In the summers he traveled to the Volga, the Caucasus and Jerusalem, and made many drawings and paintings from nature. In 1908 Filonov was admitted at last to the Academy of Arts. His works attracted the attention of both students and professors by their unusualness: they were not abstract and depicted their subject with full likeness, but were executed in garish, bright colors - reds, blues, greens and oranges. This manner did not conform to the Academy standards, and Filonov was dismissed ¡°for influencing students with the lewdness of his work¡±. Filonov protested the decision of the rector Beklemishev, and was rehabilitated, but after studying for two years he left the Academy in 1910.
The first works that foreshadow his analytical method appeared in 1910: a watercolor Peasant Family, and oil painting Heads. In this painting, differently scaled images are combined on canvas, growing from each other and intervening to form a flowing phantasmagorical unity. In the 1910s, Filonov¡¯s work was centered around St. Petersburg societies the Union of Youth and the Union of Artists (1910 -1913), in the founding of which he took an active part. To this period belong his famous works West and East, East and West, Men and Woman (all 1912-13) and The Feast of Kings (1913). These paintings combine elements of symbolism, neo-primitivism and expressionism. In 1912 Filonov traveled for 6 m.... |
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