Lot 24: MATIUSHIN, MIKHAIL. 1866-1934. Russian Books and Photographs

Zakonomernost izmenyaemosti tsvetovykh sochetanii. Spravochnik po tsvetu[The Laws Governing the Variability of Colour Combinations: A Handbook of Color].Moscow and Leningrad: OGIZ, 1932. 8vo.32 pp.With 30 fold-out pochoir color tables. Red cloth portfolio of color tables with essay by M. V. Matiushin laid in.Portfolio rubbed and soiled, seams worn, essay spotted. Provenance: Presentation inscription to Ilya Nikolaevich Kiselev on front folder; IZORAM or Art of Working Youth stamps; bookplate of distinguished collector Mikhail Ivanovich Chuvanov. ONE OF 400 COPIES.M. V. Matiushin was a highly influential Russian avant-garde painter, composer, musician, teacher and important color theorist.His second wife was the Cubo-Futurist writer and painter Elena Guro.He provided the music, Velimer Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh the libretto and Kazimir Malevich the sets and costumes for the famous experimental play Pobeda nad Solntsem [Victory over the Sun] (1913). Spravochnik po tsvetu, one of the last manifestos of the Russian Avant-Garde, reflected Matiushin's progressive art classes in the Leningrad Workshop of Vkhutein and INHUK and summarized his attitude toward modern art for painters, architects, textile designers, ceramists and other artists.He developed in the Department of Organic Culture the concept of what he called zvorved, or "see-know." Although the country was drifting toward Social Realism, Matiushin's radical treatise miraculously passed the censors to be issued in this small edition.Art historian Margareta Tillberg of the University of Stockholm has done extensive research on Matiushin's theories."With a panoramic visual angle of 360° producing a new spatial reality of the fourth dimension, colours would emerge more intensely than in our normal, physical world," Prof Tillberg explains in her essay "The Russian Avant-Garde and Colour as Worldview." "With untrained eyes a stone, for example, would seem 'dead', immobile, static. In the fourth dimension, however, it should be possible to see the low frequency waves of solid materials such as stones and minerals. With cars at one speed, people at another, trees growing at yet a third speed, to the untrained eye, the world seems scattered and fragmented. For those who could apply the extended vision however, the whole world would, from an ontological perspective, appear completely different, with all links and connections organically unified."The handbook contains elaborate hand-colored color charts that defined his principles of harmonic color matching. Each color table presents a combination of three different colors, two bound by a third, producing intense, radiant color effects. Malevich was so taken with Matiushin's color tables that he took a set of them with him to Berlin; these are now in Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. No copy listed in OCLC, but MOMA has one. Source: www.iscc.org/aic2001/abstracts/oral/Tillberg.doc.