Space (360-Degree View)

The title of this picture is meant quite literally. By 1920 Matyushin had spent years on an idea that grew out of his reading about the fourth dimension, in books by the British mathematician Charles Howard Hinton and the Russian writer Pyotr Ouspensky. He was convinced that an artist could learn to see far beyond the narrow field in front of the eyes, and he called the practice expanded seeing. In his teaching he went as far as having students draw, blindfolded, what lay behind them. Space, with its promise of a 360-degree view, belongs to that experiment, an attempt to take in the whole circle around the painter at once. Early in 2024 the Stedelijk included it in Cosmism, an exhibition about Russian artists of the period who were drawn to ideas of humanity's future in the cosmos.