ST PETERSBURG, RUSSIAN FEDERATION.- For the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg, the State Russian Museum in co-operation with Proactive PR has organized a full-scale exhibition entitled "Pavel Filonov. Witness of the Unseen," which will run to October 1. It is the largest ever retrospective of Filonov, and the first since 1988 for this major figure of the Russian avant-garde. Filonov, who devoted his life to developing his own original method of painting, is recognized and loved by art historians, but the general public knows little about him as a consequence of strict Soviet censorship.

The main objective of the exhibition is to fill in the blank, to acquaint museum-goers from Russian and abroad with the work of a great Russian artist and demonstrate his contribution to world culture by emphasizing the unique spiritual and aesthetic qualities expressed in Filonov's paintings and drawings.

The exhibition includes 160 works, 85 canvases and 75 works on paper. The selected works cover all periods of the master's career. The evolution of his ideas and the nature of his thoughts on art are explored in chronological order and in thematic sections.

The artist's unique method and the complex paintings that employ it unfold in a surprising way - the curators made the bold decision to fully transform the exhibition space to best present Filonov, and found an original architectural solution to enhance their concept. The Benois Wing will be cloaked in darkness, and point lighting will help viewers focus their gaze on each of the artist's works, to fully understand his technique and his genius.

For the first time, visitors will be able to see a unique electronic instrument called the ANS synthesizer. It was invented in 1938 by the electric engineer Yevgeny Alexandrovich Murzin, who named it after his favorite composer (Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin). A working model of ANS was first built in 1958, and today the Russian Museum presents its third version, the only one in existence. The ANS resembles a contemporary scanner; it takes an image and transforms it into a sound. Thus, the viewer will have the unique opportunity to hear Filonov's works.

The companion catalogue illustrates not only of works displayed at the exhibition, but those from the collection of the Russian Museum (which owns a significant portion of Filonov's works) that were not included. For the catalogue, many of the dates and names were corrected to correspond with the artist's catalogue of 1929. These changes in attribution are an extremely significant contribution to understand the artist's works.

A two-volume compendium of materials on Filonov has been published for the exhibition. It includes writings by the artist, memoirs about him by contemporaries and an album of his works. It will be the most comprehensive and encyclopedic publication on the artist's work ever published in Russia or beyond.

Especially for "Pavel Filonov. Witness of the Unseen," the contemporary Conceptual artist Vadim Zakharov has created an installation that sheds new light on Filonov's contribution to world culture. Zakharov's work is a perpetually moving sculpture of a lion reading Filonov's autobiography. It gives an interpretation of Filonov's concept of Utopia, an important aspect of the Russian mentality.

From December 5 to February 4, "Pavel Filonov. Witness of the Unseen" will be on view at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

A major portion of Pavel Filonov's works belong to the State Russian Museum. However, for many years they were kept in storage and visitors were not allowed to see them. Even now, when Filonov's paintings have been part of the museum's permanent exposition for more than 15 years, one can still say that his work is not well-known to the public.

Filonov (b. 1882/1883 - d. 1941) was born in Moscow. Orphaned at an early age, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he took painting lessons. In 1908 he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. In February 1910 Filonov help organized the Union of Youth, an artists' society that played a decisive role in his career, after being expelled from the Academy of Fine Arts, returning to it and then leaving for good. The exhibitions of this society were the first to show his works, mainly mixed media on paper. Of these, "Man and Woman," "Peasant Family," "East and West" and "Feast of Kings" are in the collection of the Russian Museum. In their use of allegory, personification and their passionate interest in "eternal themes" of existence, these works are close to Symbolism and Modernism. They show how the artist developed his individual style of constructing a painting out of crystalline colored cells, like a soundly "made" thing. However, unlike Tatlin, for instance, Filonov is a "conservative futurist" and did not switch to design, staying in the framework of pure, sparkling, colorful painting.

"Feast of Kings, "painted in 1913, when World War I already loomed, became a visible, tangible image of universal evil that burdened man and everything humane in him. In 1913 Filonov built theatrical decorations for Vladimir Mayakovksy's eponymous tragedy. For the next two years, Filonov worked as an illustrator for futurist booklets, published his own transrational poem "Sermon on the Burgeoning World" and began to develop theories of art: "The Ideology of Analytic Art" and "Principles of Madeness."

In the decade before the Revolution, two circles of imagery appeared frequently in Filonov's art. One was the theme of the modern city, which Filonov - like Guro, Kamensky and Khlebnikov - perceived as the source of evil, crippling man physically and spiritually. The artist was an opponent of urbanism and resisted "machinated" civilization. This philosophical position is strikingly expressed in "Rebirth of Man" (1914-15). The artist deeply sympathizes with the victims of the "machine," which grinds man to meal, robbing him of individuality. This position led Khlebnikov, an admirer of Filonov's pre-Revolutionary works, called him "a poet of urban suffering."

In "Animals" (1925-28), monstrous beasts with almost human faces wander amid featureless stone structures. Filonov rejected civilzation's break with nature, which he believed led to a degeneration of the human soul. Khlebnikov wrote that "souls of beasts, exorcized from bodies... built animal cities in the hearts of men." These "souls of beasts" that possessed mankind are at the essence of Filonov's anti-urban paintings and drawings.

Filonov opposes the soullessness of contemporary civilization with the humanist utopia "World Flowering," in which just and brotherly life reigns on Earth. This is the subject of a large cycle of paintings, including "Three at a Table," "Flowers of the World Flowering" and "Peasant Family."

After the Revolution of 1917, Filonov worked on completing his book "Analytical Painting." The social changes in Russia inspired the Futurists. Filonov devoted a great amount of time and effort to his artistic inventions and creative ideas. He worked 18 hours a day. In 1919 the artist's paintings were exhibited at the first public free exhibition of workers' art in Petrograd. In 1923 Filonov became a professor of the Academy of Fine Arts and a member of the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKHUK). Around that time Filonov's "Declaration of World Burgeoning" was published in "Zhizn Iskusstva" ("Life of Art"). In 1925, when Filonov had found many followers and supporters, he created a school of analytical painting in Petrograd. This school was closed by the government in 1928, along with all other private artistic and cultural organizations. Due to continuing sharp criticism and attacks on Filonov, the exhibition he had planned in 1929-30 at the Russian Museum never took place.