Art of the 20th Century
Pavel Filonov
Pavel Filonov
(b Moscow, 20 Jan 1883; d Leningrad [now St Petersburg], 3 Dec 1941).
Russian painter, graphic artist and poet. He came from a working-class background; orphaned in childhood, he moved to St Petersburg, where he earned money through embroidery, house painting, restoring buildings and icons, and other tasks such as retouching photographs and making posters and wrappers for goods (a practical apprenticeship he never forgot). His interest in drawing and painting developed through copying, making portraits and the close study of human and animal anatomy. He entered the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg (1908) with difficulty but he left without graduating; his only important teacher was L. E. Dmitriyev-Kavkazsky (1849–1916), with whom he studied privately. Largely self-taught, he was a man of considerable intellectual powers.
