Some years ago, climbers passing along the foot of an Austrian glacier came upon a macabre find. At their feet, among the pebbles, lay the body of a young man. The odd thing about him was that he was wearing an Austrian uniform of World War I. It soon became clear that this was the corpse of a soldier from that war who had fallen into a crevasse and died. The glacier had, over the years, silently carried him down the mountain and released him, dead but unchanged, as it thawed. As much could be said of the Russian painter Pavel Nicolaievich Filonov (1883-1941), who only recently emerged (at about the same time too), after sixty years in an artistic deep-freeze.
Filonov had the misfortune of falling into a crevasse of history. A retrospective of his work had been scheduled at the Russian Museum in Leningrad in 1929. The artist, then forty-seven, had a strong reputation and a following. The works were hung, the catalog was ready, but official artistic policy went through an unexpected turn and the show never opened. Instead, a hostile critic was hastily summoned to provide a new catalog text. In it he proved to Stalinist officialdom's satisfaction that Filonov, though the son of a washerwoman and a coachman, was in fact a mystic "petit bourgeois" individualist, wrapped up in the past, an opponent of the new reality, and that his work was alien to the real concerns of the proletariat-a deadly sin in those days.
A few workers' delegations were even taken through the museum to test this thesis, but to the disappointment of his detractors, they liked what they saw. Still, the official dogma of Socialist Realism was hostile to Filonov, and he became an outcast. Ultimately he died from cold and starvation in the streets of Leningrad during the 1941 siege.
Two years ago, however, Filonov finally emerged posthumously from his glacier. Like a macabre yet oddly touching scene from a film by Tarkosvski, the very same Russian Museum of Leningrad once more arranged a show - and this time it opened on schedule. Three hundred paintings and drawings were on view, a multitude of visitors from young punks to older intellectuals came every day, and the works provoked avid interest and animated discussion in Moscow as well, where the exhibition was shown later at the Tretykov Gallery.
A reduced version of the same show, comprising 158 items, moved this winter to the Pompidou Center in Paris. The discovery of this unknown body of work may have disconcerted French viewers, partly because the paintings are often idiosyncratic and do not fit into acknowledged categories. Instead, they reflect one man's elaborate response to situations, assumptions, and a life context of which we have only a general and rather abstract idea today. We have come to terms with Malevich (whom Filonov himself respected) because his work was been in the West in his lifetime. But Filonov remained virtually unknown, and our art history has been written while he was out.
Unpredictably Eclectic
What makes it all the more tiresome for those who will have to do the rewriting of art history is that Filonov's style is unpredictably eclectic. Other artists can also be quite eclectic (think of Picasso), but their diversity is neatly packaged into periods. Not so Filonov. At almost any moment of his life he can be seen shuttling feverishly from photo-realism to a highly
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