Peasant Family (The Holy Family)
1914
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Location in museum
The Benois Wing
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Room 78 - Period Late 19th century – Early 20th century
- CategoryBiblical Subject
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Pavel Filonov’s Peasant Family (The Holy Family) belongs to his Towards a Universal Blooming cycle of paintings. By the term «universal blooming», the artist implied a single front that would reveal and realize common human values, with the spiritual role of the artist as its constituent element. Filonov called himself an «artist of the universal blooming» and conceived every painting as an independent and organic development of artistic forms. Like other contemporaries, Pavel Filonov addresses canonic subjects from the New Testament, confirming the eternal nature and the philosophical importance of certain situations. Russian Museum: From Icons to the Modern Times. Palace Editions, St Petersburg, 2015. P. 334.
Filonov believed that the animal and human worlds were once indivisible, when people and animals lived in harmonic unity. The horse, dog, cockerel and hen are fully-fledged members of the Peasant Family (Holy Family). The equals of the human beings, they have human facial expressions. All the heroes of this painting express their sympathy for one another.