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Museum of the Petersburg Avant-garde
Devoted to the flowering of the Russian avant-garde in literature, music and visual art in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, this small museum is located in a charming wooden house on the Petrograd Side, which was once occupied by painter and musician Mikhail Matyushin.
Over the years the house provided accommodation to many of the greatest figures of Futurism.
A key - if often overlooked - figure in the development of experimental music and painting, Matyushin was a court musician who came to the avant-garde when already in his forties, but nonetheless led seminal investigations into the interrelationship between form and colour, and colour and sound. Equally significant was his role as a collaborator and mentor for his younger (and subsequently much more famous) colleagues. This perhaps reached its apogee in Victory Over The Sun, the first Futurist opera, with score by Matyushin, libretto by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, and set designs by Kazimir Malevich. He was also instrumental in the production of several of the major Futurist manifestoes, and other luminaries who gathered at his house in the early 1920s included poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, painter Pavel Filonov, and poet and artist David Burliuk.
While this elegant wooden house does not contain major works by any of the artists mentioned, it does have - alongside the personal effects of Matyushin and his wife, the poetess Elena Guro - a wealth of engravings, sketches, sculpture, and art-related publications that provide valuable insight into development of the Futurist movement before and after the October Revolution.
Over the years the house provided accommodation to many of the greatest figures of Futurism.
A key - if often overlooked - figure in the development of experimental music and painting, Matyushin was a court musician who came to the avant-garde when already in his forties, but nonetheless led seminal investigations into the interrelationship between form and colour, and colour and sound. Equally significant was his role as a collaborator and mentor for his younger (and subsequently much more famous) colleagues. This perhaps reached its apogee in Victory Over The Sun, the first Futurist opera, with score by Matyushin, libretto by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, and set designs by Kazimir Malevich. He was also instrumental in the production of several of the major Futurist manifestoes, and other luminaries who gathered at his house in the early 1920s included poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, painter Pavel Filonov, and poet and artist David Burliuk.
While this elegant wooden house does not contain major works by any of the artists mentioned, it does have - alongside the personal effects of Matyushin and his wife, the poetess Elena Guro - a wealth of engravings, sketches, sculpture, and art-related publications that provide valuable insight into development of the Futurist movement before and after the October Revolution.
