Analytical Art or Universal Flowering (Mirovoi rastsvet) Starting from the principles of Cubism, Pavel Filonov considered it necessary to enrich his method, limited by rationalism, with the principle of “organic growth” of the artistic form and “making” of paintings on the principle of “from private to general,” where the picture develops from a point like a germinating grain. Analytical Art is a genre of surrealistic Cubism futurism.
Filonov’s philosophy was originally formalized in written form in 1915, which was revised and published as The Declaration of Universal Flowering in 1923 when Filonov was a professor at the (then) Petrograd Academy of Arts. Filonov’s main theoretical work The Ideology of Analytical Art (Ideologia analiticheskogo iskusstva) was published in 1930.
Already in 1912 Filonov proclaimed a first essay on the principles of a so-called analytical art in the essay “Canon and Law” (Канон и закон).
“We do not defend ourselves and do not attack. We go our way; but if we are to be shown a connection to kubub futurism, then we answer: You want to find a connection between our theory and our predecessors, but not about kubub futurism and Pic [asso ] but about the cold and relentless denial of all their mechanics. ”
Analytical art was thus consciously placed in opposition to the then prevailing Futurism (founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) and Cubism (initiated by Pablo Picasso) as well as their fusion in Russia into Cubofuturism. The analytical art had initially a strong orientation to nature and the natural, such. For example, the picture “Fischerschonner” (1913, 106×100 cm, oil on paper on canvas), in which Filonov reveals a perpetual metamorphosis true to the new principles that one
“Pure form in the art of any thing painted with an open connection to the evolution that takes place in it, i. with the every-second transformation into something new, as well as with the functions and the development of this process. ”
Since the beginning of 1914, Filonov laid the foundation for the founding of an artists’ association, which was to follow the principles of analytical art. His first companions included David N. Kakabadze, Anna M. Kirillov, Elsa A. Lasson-Spirova and Yevgeny K. Pskovitinov. In March 1914, this association in St. Petersburg published the manifesto “Intime Workshop of painters and draughtsmen> Made Images” as the first printed declaration of analytical art. On the title page was a reproduction of Filonov’s “The Feast of the Kings” (in the original 175×215 cm, oil on canvas) reprinted.
“Our goal is to create paintings and drawings that are made with all the beauty of persevering work, knowing that the most valuable thing about a painting or a drawing is man’s powerful work on a thing in which he expresses himself and his Immortal soul revealed. ”
“I am the artist of world-flowering, hence a proletarian. I call my principle naturalistic because of its purely scientific method of thinking about an object, foreseeing it adequately and exhaustively, intuitionally intuiting all its predicates to the unconscious and superconscious, and showing the object in a creative solution appropriate to the perception. It activates all predicates of the object and its sphere: Being, the pulsation and its sphere, Biodynamics and intellect, emanations, implications, recoveries, processes in color and form – in short, life as a whole; and it does not take the sphere as a mere space, but as a biodynamic sphere in which the object is in constant emanation and interpenetration. The being of the object and the sphere are in eternal becoming, in the transformation of color, form and processes (absolute analytic vision). Here is the formula of this method: absolute analysis, foresight of the object and its sphere in the sense of biomonism and perception-adequate solution. Hence the notion of continuity of the one front: the two predicates of realism (raw form and raw color), compressed and precisely worked out form and color, use of shifts, pure active form, etc. ”
It is more a question of opening up the methods by which nature governs than of the forms that it produces. It is about the subterranean processes of the world in order, in a sort of scientific manner, to track down the buzzing microcosm of life, what holds it together at its core.
“Since I know, analyze, see, intuitively feel that any object possesses not only two predicates, form and color, but a whole world of visible and invisible phenomena, their emanations, reactions, implications, genesis, being, known or common predicates I reject the dogma of the modern realism of the “two predicates” and all its right and left sects as unscientific and dead – altogether. In its place I set the scientific, analytical, intuitive naturalism, the initiative of the one who investigates all the predicates of the object, the phenomena of the whole world, the visible and the phenomena and processes not visible to the naked eye, the perseverance of the researcher Artist and the principle of the “biological picture”. ”
Pavel Filonov suggested that even large paintings with a small brush to paint, such as. B. “Formula of spring” (250×285 cm, oil on canvas). He taught his disciples:
“Manually and exactly every atom. Carefully and precisely introduce the colors to be worked into each atom so that it can dig in like heat in a body. ”
This formulation may sound exaggerated, yet Filonov has taken it seriously – and in doing so has achieved incredible effects of depth, delicacy, complexity, chaoticism, and infinity. It oscillates and pulsates, it loses and finds itself, it shatters and grows together. Non-representational and objective things are constantly merging, becoming two sides of a single world. The figurative is the continuation, the composition of non-figurative organic structures. And it also leads back to the abstractness of macrocosm.
In the summer of 1925 Filonov was able to work in one of the rooms of the Russian Academy of Art together with his new students. They formed an artistic grouping, the “Collective of Masters of Analytical Art” (Мастера аналитического искусства, MAI), which was officially recognized as an artists’ society by around 40 members only around 1927. This was also called the workshop of analytical art (Мастерская аналитического искусства).
These artists look at things more with a knowing and not only seeing eye in order to present it in “series of transformational processes”. Such analytical art strives for the plant-organic and mystical cosmic and its founder to a Russian counterpart of Paul Klee.
In his autobiography of April 1929 Filonov was able to determine his influence, if only partially or conditionally, on the currents in painting and graphics from Suprematism to German Expressionism. In 1930, Filonov’s theoretical work “The Ideology of Analytical Art” was published.
“Here is a brief list of my means as a master and their definitions: Compressed and sharply expressed form and color. Displacement-containing form, biodynamics of displacement. Pure active form, the object and its predicates, their choice or the absolute complex absolutely adequate (same definition also for color and sound). The formula: a complex or a selection of pure, active forms, abstract and artistic choices in all these things. Organic aesthetics, aesthetic dissonance. The same applies to the construction and law of a painting, from the biological to the constructive as such. Transfer the pulse beat into rhythm and its maximum tension, incorporating the sound as an overpass via rhythm. I do not set any rules, nor do I start a school (I reject this approach), but I offer as a basis a simple, purely scientific method that anyone, right or left, can use. The slogans “made painting”, “rejection of modern art criticism”, “transference of focus of contemporary art to Russia”, “pure active form”, “world blossom” were first published by me in Petrograd in 1914/1915. ”
The MAI group of artists, as well as some others, was simply dissolved in 1932 by Soviet cultural policy. Some of the approximately 70 students have continued to use his workshop (until the starvation of the founder in beleaguered Leningrad), while his successors continue to implement the principles so intensely articulated.