Mikhail Matyushin

Michael Vasilyevich Matyushin (Russian: Михаил Васильевич Матюшин; 1861 in Nizhny Novgorod – 14 October 1934 in Leningrad) was a Russian painter and composer, leading member of the Russian avant-garde. In 1910–1913 Matyushin and his wife Elena Guro (1877–1913) were key members of the Union of the Youth, an association of Russian Futurists. Matyushin, a professional musician and amateur painter, studied physiology of human senses and developed his own concept of the fourth dimension connecting visual and musical arts, a theory that he put to practice in the classrooms of Leningrad Workshop of Vkhutein and INHUK (1918–1934) and summarized in his 1932 Reference of Colour (Cправочник по цвету).Matyushin conducted experiments at his Visiology Center (Zorved) to demonstrate that expanding visual sensitivity from retinian optical centers would enable the discovery of "new organic substance and rhythm in the apprehension of space." He tried to teach himself and his students to see with both eyes, each independently, and to widen the field of their vision. He describes some of his work and ideas in a long essay titled "An Artist's Experience of the New Space."

Matyushin was a bastard son of a landlord and a serf woman. According to his own memoirs, at an early age he studied reading, writing and playing violin himself; at the age of eight he was admitted to the music classes of Nizhny Novgorod Concervatory and in 1875 to Moscow Conservatory. Matyushin was also inclined to painting, but could not afford college training at the time. After graduation in 1881 Matyushin joined the Court Orchestra in Saint Petersburg and played with it professionally until 1913. He received formal training in graphic arts with an independent school in Saint Petersburg in 1890s.

Matyushin met his second wife, writer and painter Elena Guro, at Ian Tsonglinski art school where both trained in 1903–1905. Guro, sixteen years his younger, dramatically changed Matyushin's view of art and society and the two became a seed for the Russian Cubo-Futurism 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". 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, invented "my unforgettable son", 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. She died in April 1913.

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