Mikhail Matyushin
Michael Vasilyevich Matyushin (
Biography
Early career
Matyushin was the illegitimate son of a landlord and a
Cubo-Futurism
Matyushin met his second wife, writer and painter Elena Guro, at Ian Tsonglinski art school where both trained in 1903–1905.[2] Guro, sixteen years his younger, dramatically changed Matyushin's view of art and society and the two became a seed for the Russian Cubo-Futurist movement evolving parallel to Italian Futurism. Matyushin was the oldest person among the futurists, and Alexander Blok sarcastically wrote that Matyushin "futuristically seeks to look younger".[3] In 1910 Matyushin and Guro sponsored and co-authored Trap for Judges (Садок судей), the first almanac by Russian Futurists. The couple did not have children, but in 1912 Guro, suffering from leukemia,[2] invented "my unforgettable son",[4] a literary mystification that persisted past her death and became a subject of her book Autumnal Dream (Осенний сон, 1912) set to music by Matyshin in 1921.[4] She died in April 1913.[5]
Victory Over The Sun
In the same 1913, the year that became
INHUK was closed and merged to State Institute of Visual Arts (GIII) in December 1925;[8]
Art theories
In 1918 avant-garde artists took over the former
Matyushin, along with Malevich and
Another problem handled by Matyushin was the human inability to see all 360 degrees.[14] In 1923 Matyushin wrote that the solution lies in the artist's personal development to the point where he attains "a physiological change in the previous methode of perception"[14] and introduced the concept of a rear plane, a layer of rearward information previously "outside the human sphere due to inadequacies of experience".[14] Matyushin formed a new study group, Zorved (Зорвед, literally see and know) and claimed that it discovered evidence of perception of events and object located behind the person, and that humans possess visual centers capable of resolving this rearward "vision".[14]
Legacy
The wooden house of Matyushin and Guro in Saint Petersburg (59°58′15″N 30°18′45″E / 59.970912°N 30.312384°E) now houses the Museum of Avant-Garde in Saint Petersburg, a division of the State Museum of History of Saint Petersburg.[15] The house, originally built in the 1840s or 1850s, became the property of the Literary Foundation (Литературный фонд) in 1904 and operated as an artists' hotel.[15] Matyushin and Guro moved into flat 12 in 1912. The place also provided shelter for Malevich, Filonov, Mayakovsky and other notable artists of the Russian avant-garde and socialist realism.[15]
Olga Konstantinovna, the third wife and widow of Matyushin, lived there until her death in 1975; during the Siege of Leningrad her room was taken over by Vsevolod Vishnevsky and a special order preserved the building from being pulled down for firewood.[15] After 1979, when the last residents had moved out or died, Matyushin's house became a public museum.[15] However, the present building is a contemporary replica: the original house was taken apart and rebuilt from new wood in 1987; after a fire in 1990 and many later setbacks it was rebuilt again and reopened in 2006.[15]
Gallery
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Son, c. 1910
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Painterly-Musical Composition, 1918
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Absctract Composition with Crystalline Forms, 1920
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Movement in Space (c. 1923)
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Kazimir Malevich, Portrait of Mikhail Matyushin, c. 1913
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Matyushin, Alexei Kruchonykh, and Malevich at the First All-Russian Conference of the Bards of the Future, 1912. Photo by Karl Bulla.
References
- ^ "Mikhail Matyushin". monoskop.org. Retrieved June 5, 2014.
- ^ a b Grodberg, p. 239
- ^ Volkov, p. 276
- ^ a b Grodberg, p. 240
- ^ Grodberg, p. 238
- ^ Clark, p. 38
- ^ a b Clark, p. 39
- ^ Clark, p. 203
- ^ Clark, p. 151
- ^ Clark, p. 148
- ^ Clark, pp. 50-51
- ^ Constructivists asserted that new consciousness can be attained not through individual breakthroughs, but through rebuilding of living environment - Clark, p.51.
- ^ Clark, p. 51
- ^ a b c d Clark, p. 44
- ^ a b c d e f "Museum of Avant-Garde in Saint Petersburg (official site in Russian)". State Museum of History of Saint Petersburg. 2008.
Sources
- Clark, Katerina (1998). Petersburg, crucible of cultural revolution. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-66336-7.
- Cooke, Raymonde (1987). Velimir Khlebnikov: a critical study. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-32670-4.
- Everdell, William (1997). The first moderns: profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-22480-0.
- Howard, Jeremy (1992). The Union of Youth: an artists' society of the Russian avant-garde. Manchester University Press ND, 1992. ISBN 978-0-7190-3731-3.
- Leach, Robert (1994). Revolutionary theatre. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-03223-0.
- Grodberg, Kristi A., Elena Guro in: Ledkovskaya-Astman, Maria; et al. (1994). Dictionary of Russian women writers. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-26265-4. pp. 238–242
- Matyushin, Mikhail (2007). Михаил Матюшин. Профессор академии художеств (Mikhail Matyushin: Professor of Academy of Arts) (in Russian and English). NT Print, Moscow. ISBN 978-5-901751-70-1.
- Perloff, Marjorie (2003). The futurist moment: avant-garde, avant guerre, and the language of rupture. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-65738-7.
- Roberts, Graham (2006). The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU - Fact, Fiction, Metafiction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-02834-9.
- Smith, Bernard (1998). Modernism's history: a study in twentieth-century art and ideas. UNSW Press. ISBN 978-0-86840-744-9.
- Volkov, Solomon (1995). St. Petersburg: a cultural history. Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-874052-2.