Mikhail Matyushin

1861, Nizhny Novgorod—1934, Leningrad

Root sculptures, 1920s
Wood, 22 × 22 × 27 cm, 29 × 20 × 17 cm, 25 × 25 × 34 cm, 27 × 16 × 15 cm, 18 × 20 × 18 cm, 30 × 26 × 46 cm
Museum of Organic Culture, Kolomna

These root sculptures by one of the leaders of Russian Futurism, Mikhail Matyushin, are a unique example of a conscious turn toward Nature during the avant-garde period, a time better known for its admiration for the Machine. In Nature’s ready-mades Matyushin found what he seeking: the organic principle of movement that coincided with the form and structure of the material. The laws of natural growth inspired him to search for a new, fourth dimension in art.

Matyushin saw art as an act of creation and a continuation of Nature’s creative work. “The rocks are my fathers,” he wrote, affirming the unity of the laws of organic and non-living nature. His vision of the world as an organic whole implied that humans were also an object for creative exploration, not in the avant-garde sense of constructing a new person but as a natural development of the possibilities  of the human organism. In the 1920s, Matyushin headed the department of organic culture at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK) in Leningrad. There, he and his pupils studied the potential for expanding human attention, sense of touch, hearing and sight (including “expanded seeing” using the back of the head and the spine). Matyushin was both an artist and a musician, and this led him to examine the phenomenon of synesthesia and the relationship between color and sound.