Analytical Art

Pavel Filonov created his own theory of analytical art and headed its school. Filonov’s oeuvre followed the laws of nature. The artist believed that a picture should be created in the same manner as the way flowers, grass and all things organic grow in nature. Filonov usually began painting by selecting some point on the canvas and then “cultivating” the representation, forming and arranging the compositions from daubs of paint, like in a kaleidoscope.

Analytical art was a form of anti-Cubism, which envisaged representing objects using elements of their inner soul, rather than their surface geometry.

Declaration of Universal Flowering advocated slowly moving from the particular to the general in a picture by creating tiny, minute details.

The meanings of Filonov’s works remain a mystery for the spectators because they were ingeniously encrypted. In his works, man-made things and natural things, people and animals, exchange appearance and meaning with one another, intermingling, flowing into another and becoming something wholly different. The essence of his method was to break up the visible world into individual elements and then to synthesize from them complex images full of hidden symbolic meaning. In his works he created an enciphered, mystical picture of the world, striving to extend the possibilities of representational art and make the invisible visible.