Cubism represents objects using elements of their surface geometry but “analytical realists” (Filonov and his students) should represent objects using elements of their inner soul.
He believed that objects and fields should be built up from small details and bits and stated that doing it the other-way-round was nothing short of “charlatanism”. To this end, he worked, and required his students to work, with very small brushes in painting and the finest of points when drawing. No one, however, painted up to Filonov’s stringent standard.
Being one of the last avant-garde artists in the USSR, he died of starvation as Socialist Realism settled into its state-wide reign of aesthetic terror (i.e. a 60+ year buffet of blandness).
But Filonov had the last brushstroke: there was a legend in the Union that Filonov’s ghost protected his art and anybody trying to steal his paintings or to smuggle them abroad would soon die, become paralyzed, or have a similar misfortune.
