Landscape

In 1920, the year given for this landscape, Matyushin was nearly 60 and teaching painting in Petrograd, in the building of the former Imperial Academy of Arts. After the revolution the old academy had been turned into free state art studios, and Matyushin, who had trained in evening classes and private studios and never at the academy itself, now ran a studio of his own there. He called its approach spatial realism. Among his students in those years were three siblings, Boris, Maria and Ksenia Ender, who stayed close to him and later worked beside him on his research into colour and perception. The picture itself is wide and low, about 40 centimetres high and 67 across.