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Pavel Nikolaevich Filonov was born in 1883 in Moscow. In 1896 he settled in Petersburg, where he attended colouring and decorating classes until 1901 and studied at the School of the Society for the Promotion of Arts (1898-1903). In 1908 he began studying in the workshop of Lev Dmitriev-Kafkashi at the Academy of Fine Arts in Petersburg, from which he was expelled in 1910. He was engaged in scenic design ('Vladimir Mayakovsky', 1913), and from 1914 he began to formulate the first theories of Analytical Art and co-wrote the manifesto 'Half-finished Paintings'. The following years were very fruitful, as he published his "Song on Universal Flowering" (1915), became associated with the State Institute of Artistic Education (GINHUK) and participated in the Exhibition of Painting of All Trends of Artists in Petrograd (1923). In 1925 he founded the collective "Artisans of Analytical Art", which operated until 1932, when it was dissolved due to increasing pressure from conservative artists. He participated in the "Exhibition of Artists of the USSR in the Last Fifteen Years: 1917-1932" in Leningrad (1932) and Moscow (1933), and during the same period he and his students supervised the illustration of the publication of the Finnish epic "Kalevala". He continued to paint on the principles of Analytical Art until his death.