Pavel Filonov

When the Nazis blockaded Leningrad in 1941, Pavel Filonov could not survive food shortages because his constitution had been weakened by fever-pitch work on art that was ignored and unpaid for by the young Soviet art system. Unlike his archrival, Malevich, who shrewdly left his works in Germany after his 1929 retrospective there and thus assured his place in European art history, Filonov naively clung to the belief that the Soviets would someday appreciate his genius. He bequeathed his work to the state, and it languished in storage for decades. As a result, Filonov remains the greatest Russian avant-garde artist that no one has ever heard of. An anonymous benefactor sponsored the current exhibition of 140 works, a virtual repeat of Filonov’s 1988 retrospective (his first ever), to give Russian audiences a chance to reassess his legacy now that they have had time to digest the history of the avant-garde.

Filonov was a man of big ideas and extreme emotions; the mood of his work oscillates between bloom and doom. Formula of the Period from 1904 to July 1922 (Universal Shift to the World Bloom through the Russian Revolution), 1920–22, a kaleidoscope of blue and violet tunnels that converge in a glowing center, is ecstatically optimistic, but works like After an Air Raid, 1938, an assembly of zombies in a wasted cityscape, convey a T. S. Eliot–like distaste for urban modernity.

No matter their temperament, Filonov’s works always boast complex and dazzling textures. He may be art history’s most brilliant doodler, with repetitive geometric patterns and haphazardly arranged figures of varying scale (as in Russia After 1905, 1912–13) that grow from his stream-of-consciousness technique. 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.