Mikhail Vasilyevich Matyushin

Mikhail Vasilyevich Matyushin (born 1861, Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire—died October 14, 1934, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]) was a Russian painter, composer, and theoretician who was a leading member of the Russian avant-garde.

Matyushin attended the Moscow Conservatory from 1878 to 1881 and was already a professional musician—first violinist of the St. Petersburg Court Orchestra (1881–1913)—when he began painting. He initially worked as a self-taught artist and completed art studies at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in 1898. After this training, he enrolled at the studio of Yan Tsionglinsky (1898–1906), where he met Yelena Guro (his future [second] wife), and studied for two semesters (1906–08) at the private studio of Yelizaveta Zvantseva with Léon Bakst and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky.

In 1909 Matyushin took part in the exhibition of Nikolay Kulbin’s group, Triangle, and that year he met the main representatives of Russian Futurism: the Burlyuk brothers; the poets Vasily Kamensky, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1911 he also met Kazimir Malevich and Aleksey Kruchonykh. In November 1909, Matyushin and Guro founded the group known as the Union of Youth, which was mainly made up of former members of Triangle. Though the couple was soon to leave the group because of differences in their aesthetic views, Guro and Matyushin remained in close contact and participated in Union of Youth exhibitions, the last of which took place in the winter of 1913–14.

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Guro did not live to see some of the high points of Matyushin’s life. In the summer of 1913, the Union of Youth, together with the Futurist poet group Hylaea (Russian: Gileya), organized the Teatr Budetlyanin (“Theatre of the Futurist”), the manifesto of which was drawn up by Kruchonykh, Malevich, and Matyushin. By December 1913 the opera Victory over the Sun had been mounted, with music by Matyushin, prologue by Khlebnikov, libretto by Kruchonykh, and costumes and sets by Malevich. The opera was noteworthy for its use of unprecedented sound effects, including the thunder of cannon fire and engine noise.

Guro played a major role in Matyushin’s life. In 1913, doubtlessly influenced by Guro, he began theoretical work on the subject of space in painting. He was particularly interested in the process by which the human eye perceives colour and space. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, he continued his theoretical research at the Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) Institute of Artistic Culture, where he became director of the Department of Organic Culture. It was there that he drew up his manifesto Zorved (the name is a combination of the words zorkost, meaning acute vision, and vedaniye, meaning knowledge) and founded a group of the same name, made up of his numerous pupils. The result of many years of work by the Zorved group was Spravochnik po tsvetu: zakonomernost izmenyayemosti tsvetovykh sochetany (1932; “A Reference Book of Colour: The Laws Governing Variability of Colour Combinations”).