Mikhail Matyushin

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).

[2] Guro, sixteen years his younger, dramatically changed Matyushin's view of art and society and the two became a seed for the Russian Cubo-Futurist movement evolving parallel to Italian Futurism.

The couple did not have children, but in 1912 Guro, suffering from leukemia,[2] invented "my unforgettable son",[4] 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.

In 1921 the state relaunched the academy and reinstalled neoclassical revivalists at its helm; despite public protests, Matyushin, Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin lost their chairs.

[11] Matyushin, along with Malevich and Pavel Filonov, was a perceptual millenarianist,[12] confident that the boundaries of individual human perception are yet unexplored and can be significantly extended in an almost mystic way.

[15] Matyushin formed a new study group, Zorved (Зорвед, literally see and know) and claimed that it discovered evidence of perception of events and object located behind the person, and that humans possess visual centers capable of resolving this rearward "vision".

[16] Olga Konstantinovna, the third wife and widow of Matyushin, lived there until her death in 1975; during the Siege of Leningrad her room was taken over by Vsevolod Vishnevsky and a special order preserved the building from being pulled down for firewood.