Analytical art

also: Analytical realism · Anti-Cubism

movement c. 1912-1941 Russia Europe

Analytical art is the method of the Russian avant-garde painter Pavel Filonov, set out in his 1912 essay 'The Canon and the Law' and also called analytical realism or 'anti-Cubism'. Where Cubism, in Filonov's view, described objects through surface geometry, analytical realism sought their inner essence: pictures were built from the smallest possible brushstrokes, proceeding from the particular to the general, 'grown' like organisms under his banner of Universal Flowering. In 1923 Filonov founded the Masters of Analytical Realism at Leningrad's INKhUK, a school of seventy-odd members. Suppressed as the Soviet state hardened around socialist realism, Filonov refused to sell, and died of starvation in the Siege of Leningrad in 1941; his work survived in hiding until the 1960s and 1980s.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Surfaces built from countless tiny brushstrokes, from the particular to the general
  • Forms 'grown' rather than outlined: figures crystallize out of dense detail
  • Prismatic, cellular color that seems to evolve across the canvas
  • Anti-geometric: depth and volume emerge organically, not from Cubist surface fracture
  • Equal intensity across every square centimeter of the 'made' painting

Key figures

  • Pavel Filonov (1883-1941) — Founder and theorist of analytical realism; led the Masters of Analytical Realism school

Example works

  • The Banquet of Kings — Pavel Filonov (1913)
  • A Peasant Family (The Holy Family) — Pavel Filonov (1914)
  • Animals — Pavel Filonov (1930)

Sources

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