Following Filonov's death from starvation in 1941 during the Siege of Leningrad, the artwork was safely preserved through the hardships of the era by his sister, Yevdokiya Nikolayevna Glebova. In alignment with Filonov's lifelong wish to keep his corpus of work together for the public, she later donated it to the State Russian Museum.
The Formula of the Cosmos (1919) by Pavel Filonov is an important representation of what was the artist’s teaching to create a scientific theory about painting known as Analytical Art and its intrinsic system or relation to a larger concept called "Universal Flowering". Filonov did not execute any pre-conceived composition with the Formula of the Cosmos; he treated the canvas like a living organism, allowing for the growth of imagery on the surface from one point outward.
The painting can be thought of as a "dense", "shifting" web of geometric shapes or forms, microscopic cellular patterns and colourful crystalline structures that merge into one another. The Formula of the Cosmos does not contain a singular "point" of reference; therefore, the viewer’s eye is forced to wander through a series of complex visual fields suggesting that the universe is in a constant process of beginning and developing.
Filonov produced the Formula of the Cosmos during the period of great upheaval of Russia's socio-political environment that followed the Revolution, and used the chaotic energy of the time to depict the scientifically and biologically representative energies of the time. Filonov was extremely motivated by sciences, physics and mathematics and considered the cosmos to be an infinite, interconnected network of unseen energies, reactions and atomic developments. In creating the Formula of the Cosmos with thousands of tiny brushstrokes, Filonov attempted to activate the viewer’s "seeing" or "knowing" eye, or the viewer who views through both their intellect and intuition outside of reality. The Formula of the Cosmos unites the macrocosmic and the microcosmic into a single composition.
This artwork like many of Filonov's other artwork portray the relationship between art and science, wherein he has focused on abstract concepts like cosmos and energy. Vibrant colors and textures portray his understanding of the complex realities of the universe.
