Collective Farmer

Pavel Filonov never experienced any qualms about simultaneously employing different styles and devices. He often combined abstraction with objectivity, intermingling artistic traditions in correspondence with each particular concept.

Like many other works of the early 1930s, this one demonstrates Filonov’s partial return to figurative painting. This image is very much a tribute to its time – the builder of the new society, albeit lacking the optimism required by the authorities.

Filonov always preferred broad epos to a simple reflection of reality and so this canvas is likened to an hagiographic icon. Like all his other creations, the image combines the common human and the everyday with the personal and the eternal.