1861 -1934 · Saint Petersburg and Russian avant-garde

Music, color in movement and expanded vision make Mikhail Matyushin one of the most original experimenters of the Russian avant-garde.

Mikhail Matiushin was born in 1861 in Nizhny Novgorod and died in Leningrad in 1934. A trained violinist, member of the Imperial Court orchestra, he approached painting with a sensitivity already structured by rhythm, interval and listening. With Elena Gouro, his wife, he transformed their house in Saint Petersburg into a center of exchange for Russian futurists. He participated in the publications of the Youth Union and in 1913 composed the music for Victoire sur le soleil, a futuristic opera designed with Alexeï Krouchonykh and Kazimir Malevich. After the revolution, he taught and continued research that he sometimes called organic culture: the eye must no longer isolate an object, but simultaneously grasp the relationships of color, space and movement that surround it. MoMA preserves Color in Motion, circa 1920, a small oil where chromatic bands seem to change under the gaze. Matiouchine also studies peripheral vision and the variations produced when a color changes neighborhood. His pictorial and musical constructions directly translate the passage between sound and color; Crystals and self-portraits fragment the face into transparent planes; multidimensional landscapes broaden the horizon beyond the single perspective. His work thus unites painting, music, pedagogy and perceptual experimentation. The selection "Mikhail Matiouchine" notably compares Abstraction and Self-portrait "Cristal". His reading favors atmosphere.

Matiouchine does not paint a still color: he observes what it becomes in contact with others, like a note changes meaning in a chord.