Energy

Expanded Seeing

One day in the early 1920s, while walking along the banks of the Neva in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then called) the landscape watercolorist Albert Benois saw a group of people painting the river while facing the opposite direction. Initially convinced that he had encountered a group of lunatics, he soon recognized them as the futurist artist and composer Mikhail Matyushin and his students, who practiced artistic seeing with the backs of their heads.34 Matyushin’s concept of “expanded seeing” (rasshirennoe smotrenie) as a fuller kind of visual perception had gestated under the influence of P. D. Ouspensky’s theosophy. The 1923 manifesto of Matyushin’s group Zorved (from archaic Russian roots “zor,” from zret’, to see, and “ved,” from vedat’, to know) professed a “physiological change of . . . the way of seeing”—an incorporation into the field of vision of what had previously remained outside of it.5 Matyushin developed his concept as the head of the Department of Organic Culture at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK) in Leningrad (as the city was renamed once again), and later, after GINKhUK was incorporated into the State Institute of Art History in 1927, as the head of the Experimental Laboratory of Physical-Physiological Foundations of Fine Arts within the institute.

Matyushin’s expanded seeing was based upon the so-called Purkinje effect, a visual phenomenon recorded by the Czech anatomist Jan Evangelista Purkinje in 1825. Purkinje noticed that the colors of the red end of spectrum were perceived as brighter in the light of the day and duller under twilight, while blues, on the contrary, acquired luminosity in the evening until, in darkness, the distinctions of color gave place to the contrast of light and shade. Moreover, if during the day human sight was focused at a 30–60-degree angle, in twilight one could observe a field of 180 degrees. At the end of the century, German physiologist Johannes von Kries explained this effect by proposing that the retina consisted of two types of photoreceptors: cones, which were situated in the center of the eye and were responsible for daytime vision, and peripheral rods, which became active at the lower levels of light. Matyushin suggested combining the two types of seeing and, furthermore, expanding the angle of seeing to a full 360 degrees.6 To do so, one would have had to see with the back of their head, and indeed, in his own physiological experiments, Matyushin discovered that the occipital part of the brain acted as an independent, nonretinal visual center. Two types of visual centers have been detected by modern psychologists: one in the middle, and the other in the cortex of the brain. Matyushin suggested that the activity of the latter, the lesser-studied cortex centers (which, he discovered, were concentrated in the brain’s posterior, occipital part), explains the effect of complementary color.

The psychological phenomenon of complementary color fascinated Matyushin. In a GINKhUK laboratory experiment, he divided a specially constructed black room with a solid screen. In one part of the room, he placed an electric lamp covered with a colored sheet, while in the other, the subject was seated facing away from the screen. The only opening in the screen was a small hole, which was hermetically closed with a hose that ended in a cap on the subject’s head. The beam of light from the first part could thus reach only the occiput of the subject, who was asked to describe their impressions. Although compared to experiments with retinal vision, the subjects needed significantly more time to analyze what they perceived, in the end, Matyushin reported, they inevitably succeeded in doing so. Moreover, as he discovered in the course of the experiment, the color perceived by the subject was not the one of the color screen but the one complementary to it.7 Another, more familiar, manifestation of the same phenomenon was the chromatic visual effect that appeared when one closed their eyes after looking at a colored shape. In this instance, Matyushin discovered, the background acquired the color complementary to that of the object, while a third color appeared around the object as a halo until the main color finally died out. The addition of the third color (which he called the linking [stsepliaiushchii] one) to the dyad of the primary and the complementary was Matyushin’s key artistic invention: he believed that it allowed him to overcome the effect of mutual dulling that occurred when contrasting colors were mixed with each other, and thus to establish a visual equilibrium between an object and its context (Plate 9). It was this discovery that allowed him to find an industrial application for his concept—wall-painting. Since 1929, he worked on The Handbook of Color: A Pattern of the Convertibility of Color Combinations—a set of tables demonstrating primary, context, and linking colors that were recommended for use on internal and external walls of buildings (Plate 10).8 Matyushin’s color tables offered a universal, standardized recipe for the calculated visual effect of color combinations that always looked brilliant and fresh.

Matyushin’s students, most importantly, the four siblings Ender—Boris, Xenia, Maria, and Georgy, descendants of a glass designer from Saxony who had settled in St. Petersburg in the nineteenth century—developed his exploration of nonretinal vision.9 Boris Ender’s theory of “complementary seeing” (dopolnitel’noe smotrenie) synthesized Matyushin’s “expanded seeing” and his interest in complementary colors. In 1924, Boris Ender conducted a series of experiments that explored the perception of a blindfolded subject. In one of them, he tightly covered his eyes with a kerchief and asked his collaborators to guide him toward the endpoint—a place that he had never seen before. Remaining blindfolded, for half an hour Ender recorded the visual impressions that he received through the back of his head; the blindfold was then removed as he proceeded to record his visual impressions, comparing them with what he had perceived previously. Like his teacher, Boris Ender was eager to find a practical application for his theory. In 1927, he became an assistant at the Committee of Contemporary Artistic Industry, headed by architect Alexander Nikolsky, the leader of the Leningrad section of the constructivist group Organization of Contemporary Architects (Ob’edinenie sovremennykh arkhitektorov, OSA), with whom Maria Ender also collaborated.10 The same year, Boris Ender moved to Moscow, where he would soon join Malyarstroy, or the State Trust for Wall-Painting Works under the Supreme Council of the People’s Economy of the USSR, contributing his expertise in the study of peripheral and nonretinal vision and his experimental approach to its emerging program of wall-painting.

Foreign Expertise

Founded in October 1928, Malyarstroy executed “wall-painting works using contemporary technological achievements.”11 The scope of the organization’s activity extended to “all sorts of wall-painting works, the interior and exterior design of residential, industrial, office, cultural, farm buildings, color design of clubs, theaters, palaces of labor and culture, urban architectural complexes, streets, and squares.”12 Explaining the goals and methods of the new organization, the head of Malyarstroy, party official Efim Stokolov, introduced wall-painting as a progressive Western technology necessary for the optimization of social and work processes:

[In] Europe and America . . . wall-painting is subjected to study, improvement, and rationalization alongside all other processes of building. Inserted into the context of scientific research, comprehensively studied, wall-painting abroad is no longer primitive, but is, as any other branch of construction, subjected to the elements of planning, economic calculation, and scientific substantiation in the application of necessary combinations of colors.

It is therefore natural that in our effort to “catch up and overtake” we cannot leave this important part of construction in a primitive state.13

Stemming from Lenin’s 1917 article “Imminent Catastrophe and How to Struggle with It,” the phrase “to catch up and overtake” (Western countries) acquired a new meaning after the announcement of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928. The goal of the plan, the construction of a centralized industrial economy, required surmounting technological barriers, and many foreign specialists were invited to the USSR to contribute to achieving this task.14

In March 1929, a special delegation of the Construction Commission (Stroykom) arrived in Germany to recruit specialists for the Soviet building industry. The committee’s head, the engineer Boris Barsky, turned for advice to architect Fred Forbát, who pointed him to Hinnerk Scheper.15 A Bauhaus graduate, Scheper had been the director of the Bauhaus Workshop of Wall-Painting since 1925 and had executed numerous wall-painting commissions in Germany, including the one for the Bauhaus building in Dessau. As early as July 1929, Scheper moved to Moscow, where he became the head of the Production-Technical Sector of Malyarstroy, a role in which he remained until September 1931.16 Scheper’s presence shaped the brief but vibrant flourishing of wall-painting in the Soviet Union.

The technological breakthrough was not only an economic endeavor but a moral one. V. Sestroretsky (who replaced Stokolov as the head of the trust) and N. Nishenko presented the task of the newly created organization as the battle against the individual craftsman: “The question of the [interior] design of homes, civil and industrial buildings, etc., cannot be excluded from the front of the cultural revolution, cannot be left in the hands of an unorganized initiative—a product of pre-Revolutionary bourgeois tastes and needs.”17 To facilitate technological development, the government created a chain of research centers and institutes, which collaborated, and sometimes conflicted, with each other. Thus, Malyarstroy was paired with Vsekhimprom (All-Union Association of the Chemical Industry); its periodical, Malyarnoe delo (Wall-Painting), published between 1930 and 1932, served both organizations. As a result, some associated wall-painting exclusively with the invention and application of chemical dyes, while others maintained a broader view of Malyarstroy’s mission, which included artistic problems.18 This ambivalence predicated the discussions that were soon to unfold around Malyarstroy.

The design work at Malyarstroy was concentrated in the Office of Design (Proektnoe Byuro, also headed by Scheper), a part of its Production-Technical Sector. Only a few of the twenty-seven people who worked in the Production-Technical Sector under Scheper were affiliated with the Office of Design. Despite its small size, the office undertook multiple commissions—over three hundred in 1931 alone.19 This work in Moscow, as Scheper’s wife Lou (also a Bauhaus graduate) recalled, provided a “tremendous field for experimentation.” Among the wall-painting projects were clubs, theaters, factory dining halls, and collective farm buildings, all of which were to become prototypes for later complete or partial reproduction.20 Most of the members of Malyarstroy’s Office of Design were trained artists. In addition to Ender, they included Lev (Leyba) Antokolsky, the eldest member of the team and the deputy editor of Malyarnoe delo, who graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, studied decorative art in Hamburg, and worked as a portraitist and monumental painter in Moscow. In 1930, immediately after graduating from the Bauhaus, Scheper’s student, the Neue Sachlichkeit painter Erich Borchert (who, unlike Scheper, was a member of the Bauhaus Communist Party cell), joined him in Moscow as his assistant.21 Borchert’s Bauhaus graduation certificate praised the successful results of his “experiments in all spheres of research of color and light on the basis of the psychology of their perception.”22 After Scheper’s return to Germany, Borchert became the head of the Office of Design. Finally, most VKhUTEIN students who graduated in monumental painting in 1929 and 1930 received internships at Malyarstroy, and some (like Borchert’s soon-to-be wife Sofia Matveeva) transitioned to permanent positions. As all of its key members were fluent in German, the design office became one of the hubs of Soviet Germanophonic culture (cooperating with its other prominent members, including Moisei Ginzburg and El Lissitzky) and a site of Soviet-German intellectual exchange.23 Describing his approach to wall-painting in 1935, Boris Ender could boast, “My work on the art of wall-painting possesses two particular qualities: on the one hand, I ground my work on color scientifically (something that even the Germans, for instance Scheper, do not do); on the other hand, I put the gradations of color (color tones) directly into production (this I have learned from Scheper).”24

Malyarstroy was modeled after such organizations as the Hamburg-based Union for Furthering Color in the Cityscape, which brought together administrators, town planners, chemists, artists, and architects, and after Scheper’s Workshop of Wall-Painting at the Bauhaus.25 Collaborating with the National Research Association for Efficiency in Construction and Housing, the Bauhaus workshop experimented with different spraying machines, the chemical properties of dyes, and methods of their mixing and application, seeking to integrate wall-painting into the program of standardization.26 As Scheper later argued, “One has to decisively turn to a mass production of new, standardized, and cheap materials, to their factory production, partially directly on the construction site, in order to use them most fully and to economize on transport.”27 Color, moreover, became an object of standardization. In 1927, Scheper’s Bauhaus workshop hosted a lecture by the color theorist and chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, the second president of the German Monist League and an early enthusiast of standardization.28 Unlike the earlier color systems, Ostwald’s system was based on the psychological perception of color. Four basic colors—the three primary plus sea green—and their gradations formed the twenty-four-color wheel, to which a gray scale was added to account for the effect of light; the resulting triangles had the achromatic scale as one of their edges and a chromatic color as the vertex facing it: all colors thus emerged as combinations of a pigment and a shade of gray. Appearing with a preface by VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN pedagogue and psychologist Sergey Kravkov, Ostwald’s Farbkunde (1923) was translated into Russian in 1926, immediately becoming the standard textbook of color theory at both VKhUTEMAS and Malyarstroy, which likewise aspired to use color as an instrument of standardization (Plate 11).29

Invisible Colors

In 1930, Scheper received an opportunity to further explore the affinity between color and standardization when Malyarstroy was invited to collaborate with the Section of Typification of Stroykom, headed by Ginzburg, on the design of its experimental residential block of the Narkomfin, which was intended to become a prototype model of typified housing. As was discussed in the previous chapter, in the Narkomfin, Ginzburg viewed the challenges of standardization through the lens of his concept of the social condenser. Accordingly, whereas some of the problems he and Scheper faced in the interior design were also pertinent for architectural modernism elsewhere, others were unique to the Narkomfin social program.

Orientation belonged to the former set of concerns. “With color, you accentuate, you classify, you clarify, you disentangle,” Le Corbusier would urge architects in 1938.30 Classifying and grouping through color coding typified information. This idea had been explored by the Viennese Verein Ernst Mach (Ernst Mach Society), whose members, including the logical positivists Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath (who were invited to lecture at the Bauhaus by Hannes Meyer), aimed to apply the methodology of empiriocriticism to a design of “life.”31 Since 1928, Neurath had been developing his system of orientation, which later became known as ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education), as a new international language. In the early 1930s he was a frequent guest in Moscow, where he continued the collaboration with Meyer. From 1931 to 1934, with graphic designer Gerd Arntz, Neurath participated in the creation of the Moscow Institute of Statistics (Izostat). His standardized pictorial signs represented concepts metonymically, operating on the level of the automatic. This approach informed Signaletik, a German term for a system of architectural prompts that facilitated orientation within a building with the help of bright contrasting colors, such as those that Scheper used in the Bauhaus building in Dessau. In large buildings, he explained, “separate colors or colorful objects and their elements might be used for orientation. Specific spaces might be colored according to their purpose, depending on their location.”32 Ginzburg, who had visited the Bauhaus in 1927, acknowledged the importance of this precedent. As in the Bauhaus building, the staircase for each level in the Narkomfin block received a distinctive color—orange, light blue, green, cobalt, vermillion (red), and Veronese green (emerald)—so that “ascending a staircase, a person could immediately orientate himself and wouldn’t accidentally end up one floor too high or too low.”33 Meanwhile, the ceilings in the two common corridors were painted gray and lemon. Furthermore, like in the Dessau house of Oskar Schlemmer, alternating doors in the Narkomfin corridors were painted black or white to be immediately distinguishable and, like in the Kandinsky/Klee house, the vertical surfaces of staircases were white and the horizontal ones black (Plate 12).

Spatial perception of architecture was another problem often associated with color by the modernists. Echoing August Schmarsow’s famous definition of architecture as the Raumgestalterin, Le Corbusier called colors “the creators of space.” Color, he argued, could make planes look closer or farther away, dissolve architecture within the landscape, and destroy the weight and density of volumes.34 By identifying architecture with color, the Swiss architect reconstituted it as a psychological phenomenon: “An architect may thus work with color as he works with proportions, or rather . . . as he would work with the geometric relations between surfaces or volumes,” he exhorted students at the Kyiv Institute of Construction in 1932.35 Similarly, in a special issue on architectural polychromy of Sovremennaya arkhitektura (Contemporary Architecture), richly illustrated with the works of Léger, Ginzburg, the journal’s editor, explained that he saw Léger’s work not as easel painting but as an analytical exercise in exploring the spatial and surface role of color (Plate 13). Beginning with the impressionists, artists had been eager to redefine painting as an expression of form through color until cubism recuperated the former; purism—an artistic “-ism” developed by Léger, Le Corbusier, and Amédée Ozenfant—then rejected the cubist dulled palette without sacrificing its concern with form.36 In Ginzburg’s classroom at the Moscow Higher Technical College (where he taught in the first half of the 1920s), the black color of the external wall, through contrast, enhanced the luminosity of the windows; the bright lemon yellow on the opposite wall, reflecting light, became an additional source of illumination; the orange of the two remaining walls contributed warmth to the room and accentuated its spatial properties, while the black on the ceiling masked the vaults.37 Similarly, a scheme proposed for an office in Ginzburg’s Government Building in Alma-Ata (contemporary Almaty, Kazakhstan; Ginzburg worked on this project with Ignaty Milinis between 1927 and 1931) had a black ceiling and a black external wall facing a bright yellow wall, while the two remaining walls were painted blue (Plate 14).

However, by the time he began working on the Narkomfin building, Ginzburg was more interested in the physiological than in the aesthetic effects of design. From his earlier fascination with purism, he moved toward Scheper’s vision of wall-painting as “being directly subordinated to architecture.” For Scheper, wall-painting served to give architecture “maximum external expressivity,” elevated it, and was therefore “able to indirectly reorganize it.”38 Ginzburg now admitted that although his earlier color schemes succeeded in correcting the conditions of lighting and space, the brightness of coloration exerted a tiring effect on the perceiver and destroyed the three-dimensionality of space.39 Accordingly, not aesthetic effect, but the perceiver’s psychological and physiological well-being became Ginzburg’s and Scheper’s prime concern at the Narkomfin. Since most everyday activities of its residents, including eating and recreation, were to be socialized, the purpose of apartments (or residential cells, as they were called) was reduced to rest, or restoring productive energy.

In the Soviet Union, rest and leisure were valorized as productive in their own right. “No such thing as absolute rest exists,” explained an architect named Kuzmin in 1930 on the pages of Sovremennaya arkhitektura: “A person is constantly working (even when he is asleep).”40 Such a program was realized, for instance, by Konstantin Melnikov in his project for the Green City (1930), a vacation town near Moscow that he interpreted as a “sleeping sonata,” a factory that would physically and mentally transform people through sleep. This explains what might have otherwise seemed paradoxical: in general, Malyarstroy’s activity concentrated on producing color schemes not for factories but for spaces associated with workers’ leisure, such as homes, clubs, canteens, theaters, and cinemas. Evoking the work of French physiologist Charles Féré to explain his understanding of how color could become an instrument of psychological influence and social transformation, Ginzburg detailed: “From the colored discs of Féré [we have to move to] color screens (i.e., large surfaces of color) and from color screens to their spatial combinations, enclosing the perceiving subject.”41

In the Narkomfin building, Malyarstroy tested two schemes of such spatial combinations of color screens, the warm and the cold.42 An oblique axonometric projection illustrates the cold scheme, to be applied in apartments of type K: three-room apartments for families with children (Plate 15). Axonometric projection was Malyarstroy’s preferred method of representation, even though it remained unpopular in the Soviet Union because of its illegibility for anyone unfamiliar with its conventions. Defending axonometry, Borchert argued that it was the most economic technique of representation, which enabled simultaneous depiction of several spaces.43 Malyarstroy’s drawing illustrating the type-K apartment color scheme is indeed difficult to read. It presents the space as if viewed through the floor, showing the apartment’s internal partitions and supporting columns suspended in the air. The ceiling is shown as a large area of bright blue, while the internal partition walls are given a light blue-grayish color. This scheme was partially realized in the “penthouse” apartment of the building’s commissioner, the minister of finance Nikolay Milyutin (Plate 16).

Two more traditional central-perspectival drawings illustrate the warm palette applied to a small, studio-like F unit, an apartment for singles and childless couples (Plate 17). The identical composition of these drawings is based on a square within which, slightly off-center, is inscribed another, smaller, square. This composition repeats the perspectival diagrammatic construction that was often cited in nineteenth-century psychological literature as an example of a figure that could be read as both pyramidal form and receding space.44 Charles Wheatstone was the first to use this diagram within a stereoscopic pair, and Mach was the first who used it as a single image. Psychologists gave different interpretations of what made the subject perceive the figure as solid or void. For Wheatstone, this depended on the location of the small square; for Wilhelm Wundt on whether one focused attention on the small or the large square; and for Wilhelm von Bezold on the color of the squares. Bezold observed that if the smaller square was orange the figure was perceived as a pyramid, while a blue smaller square turned it into a receding space (Plate 18).45 These studies were well known to early twentieth-century art theorists, including Jacques-Louis Sorel, Broder Christiansen, and Viktor Shklovsky, and the two drawings published in Malyarnoe delo indeed seem to be exploring different psychological effects of color on the perception of space.46 The first shows a pale-beige ceiling and a blue wall of the bedroom in the background, relying on the potential of white and blue to visually expand space. The other drawing seems to be contradicting the principles of the psychology of architecture. In it, the ceilings are orange and lemon yellow, while the walls are white or near-white. Why did this scheme—just as the cold scheme for the type-K apartment—depart from the convention of white ceilings, approved by psychologists? And what does this departure reveal about Ginzburg’s rejection of Léger’s bright palette?

To use the language of modern psychology, Ginzburg’s design preferences shifted from film to surface colors. This distinction was discussed in the same 1929 issue of Sovremennaya arkhitektura by psychologist Boris Teplov, whose article focused on color typology. Following the German psychologist David Katz, Teplov divided colors into surface (poverkhnostnye), film (besfakturnye), and spatial (rasprostranennye) color.47 Whereas the last category encompassed transparent colors, rarely encountered in life, the first two groups, distinguished through brightness and saturation, appeared frequently and were important for architecture. Bright and saturated film colors were glossy, immaterial, and abstract, while surface colors were material and solid, connected to the object they covered. Following Ostwald’s color theory, Katz saw surface colors as mixed with gray and, due to their light-absorbent quality, able to convey such architectural properties as facture, form, and distance. The unobtrusive quality of these slightly off-white hues emphasized the utter subordination of color to architecture. Asserting the status of architecture as an art of form and space, the surface colors used in the Narkomfin building rendered both the making and the perception of this art invisible.

Bright colors, while generally avoided in interiors, could nevertheless be found in one area: on ceilings. Scheper advocated for colorful ceilings as more appropriate for domestic spaces than sterile white. He also used the combination of nearly white walls and bright ceilings at the Bauhaus building.48 This solution acquired a new meaning for Ginzburg, who noticed that the surface of ceilings “penetrated into the consciousness only in individual, separate visual images,” which were registered by peripheral vision.49 Color, which otherwise would provoke a strong nervous agitation, should enter perception in small doses, not unlike those used by Borchert in a psychiatric hospital in Berlin, where he suggested curing mentally ill patients by prescribing small doses of bright colors.50 The brief glances that one threw on a ceiling, in other words, were too short for the color to enter the cognitive sphere and thus make one tired. Unlike ceilings, walls constantly remained in one’s field of central vision and were thus to be given an “invisible coloration” (nevidimaia rastsvetka) that was perceived by the subject without consciously registering it. This effect was achieved by means of subtle, “almost imperceptible spatial-color shades of the same, almost monochrome, gamut.” In an example suggested by Ginzburg—and indeed followed in the Narkomfin block—a room with a light-blue ceiling could have walls of cool white, pale gray, or pale yellow, while a greenish ceiling could be accompanied with mostly white, slightly greenish walls with a subtle shade of warm brown or cool white tones. If one paid a short visit to such a room, Ginzburg continued, the color of the walls would remain almost unnoticeable and the room would seem white. However, if someone remained subjected to the effect of the walls for a longer period of time, the color began “deeply, almost half-consciously to penetrate, without any noticeable visual irritation, into the sensation of the living [subject], becoming not so much a factor of color as such, but a sort of purely spatial sensation.”51

Ginzburg used the word “half-consciously” (polusoznatel’no) to describe how the “invisible . . . but sensible” (nevidimaia, no oshchushchaemaia) coloration entered the mind of the subject unregistered by consciousness. This concept was pertinent for both Matyushin’s theory of expanded seeing and the mainstream physiological research of unconscious perception employed by Scheper and Borchert. The perception of color, Borchert argued, was unconscious and thus pertinent to humans and animals alike:

People, animals, [and] plants experience the impact of color and light. This impact is usually manifested in this or that primitive reaction on a certain color environment, be it a green spring, a yellow-golden fall, or a moon-bluish light. People mostly unconsciously perceive the impact of colored light in an interior, such as a lamp with a green shade in the office or a pink lantern in the bedroom; this is similar to the unconscious agitation of a bull or a turkey cock when they see a red cloth. Color affects human body not only as the color effect of surrounding nature, but also as the effect of the chromatic solution of an interior space.52

Having removed the perception of wall-painting into the domain of the unconscious, Malyarstroy’s program culminated in its dissolution as art. Its color schemes were intended to remain unseen and unappreciated by the viewer, who was to respond to them—not aesthetically but psychologically and physiologically—by sensing spatial form and experiencing relaxation. The subject, not the building, was the ultimate object of Malyarstroy’s design.

Ergographic Wall-Painting

As Anson Rabinbach detailed in his study of modern subjectivity as “the human motor,” the concept of energy appeared in European philosophical discourse as one of its foundational notions following the developments in thermodynamics in the mid-nineteenth century.53 Energy was interpreted as the source of all mechanical, and eventually human, work. The first law of thermodynamics declared that the amount of energy possessed by a system always remained a constant: energy could be transformed but not created. The discovery of the second law of thermodynamics in the 1860s added a pessimistic note to this idea. The law postulated an inevitable loss of energy during the process of its conversion: energy was now understood as a scarce and ever-diminishing resource that had to be economized. As a result, the concepts of energy and fatigue (or, the loss of energy) became tropes of nineteenth-century psychology and physiology. Richard Avenarius’s principle of the least measure of force and Ostwald’s “energetic imperative” were only two of the most influential applications.54 Academic disciplines and practical methods of organizing industrial work turned to color as a tool of economizing energy. Rephrasing Avenarius, Scheper urged, “We have to use all achievements of technology, the laws of functionality, [and] the principle ‘of maximum effect under the least measure of force’ in order to build dwellings, which play such an important role in our life.”55

In 1884, Angelo Mosso, a physiologist from Turin, invented the ergograph, an instrument that measured fatigue in the forearms after lifting or pulling a weight.56 This invention stimulated the emergence of a new science, ergography, in the 1900s. Ergography explored how external and internal physiological factors (such as temperature, rhythm, and blood chemistry) contribute to fatigue. Particularly well known in Russia were the ergographic studies of Charles Féré. In Sensation and Movement (1900), the French physiologist described the “dynamogenity” of colors, or their effect on muscular work. His dynamometer measured the muscle strength of the arm of a subject positioned in front of a colored screen—red, orange, green, yellow, or blue. Féré’s other device, a modification of Mosso’s ergograph, recorded working energy by marking the height at which a weight could be lifted; the results were then considered to exemplify any type of muscular work.57

Other psychological studies revealed that red, yellow, and orange intensified the activity of the circulatory system, strengthened breathing, and increased the heartbeat, while blue and violet depressed physiological processes.58 Labor psychologists established that precise color vision was a necessary prerequisite for many working-class occupations, such as those related to factory production and transportation (where signaling systems were often based on color).59 They also gave architects practical suggestions regarding the noticeability of colors, the use of colored light, and the use of color as a background for work processes. Malyarnoe delo enthusiastically reported about the experience of American shoe factory Doherty and Donovan and of rubber and tobacco factories in Hamburg, where bright colors used in the interiors allegedly aroused workers’ enthusiasm and inspired tidiness, and about the example of the Montreal Industrial Painting Company, which publicized its campaign for an introduction of color in factories with a poster depicting spoilage, fatigue, depression, sickness, eye strain, and accidents flying out of the factory with the arrival of wall-painters, who carry paint buckets that bring “visibility,” “energy,” “accuracy,” “efficiency and increased output,” and ultimately “reduced insurance.”60 According to Sofia Belyaeva-Ekzemplyarskaya, who lectured at the Higher Institute of Architecture and Construction (VASI, as VKhUTEIN was renamed after the reorganization of 1930), fatigue was most easily provoked by violet, followed by red, while the least tiring color was green.61 Researchers also established that green was the best color for stimulating work, whereas red, increasing energy at first, soon induced fatigue, and blue and violet exerted a depressing effect.62 At VKhUTEIN, the notion of fatigue redefined the artistic discourse about color: whereas Matyushin had discussed colors in terms of their dullness and luminosity, in his classes, the psychologist Kravkov explained these effects through such concepts as color fatigue and the processes of color adaptation.63 A student sketchbook on color theory preserves an exercise on observing, measuring, and comparing the effects of color fatigue: the students were asked to take two pieces of paper, one chromatic (red or blue) and another black; they were then to cover half of the colored sheet with the black paper and look at it for several seconds; after removing the black sheet they were to observe that the part that was covered seemed brighter than the part that was not (Plate 19).64

In 1929, with the support of the Institute for Mass Psychology, Ladovsky planned to start an “experimental investigation of the role of color in interior architecture” in his Psychotechnical Laboratory at VKhUTEIN, in particular, of the “psychophysiological impact of color” and color’s “spatial role.”65 Ladovsky’s focus on testing and experiment came close to the constructivists’ investigation of spatial properties of color. Mikhail Barshch, Ginzburg’s former student and a Stroykom employee, became Ladovsky’s doctoral student at VKhUTEIN. Barshch’s dissertation aimed to develop “such a [working] environment and such methods of work that would ensure the maximum productivity of labor without jeopardizing the health of the worker.”66 Outlining a program for a broader use of the physiology of color perception in architecture, Barshch argued that the discoveries of Féré were applicable to several types of labor—receptor (perception-based, such as the labor of an accountant or a typesetter), effector (physical work), and cerebral—and to several environmental factors: the dimensions and the shape of the room, the shape and location of light openings, and the color and facture of walls. The architect, Barshch contended, was responsible for the optimal functioning of bodily, mental, and perceptive processes in order to economize the physiological energy of the user.67 Barshch defined the scope of his research as a study of the psychophysiological impact of color on work productivity, which he saw occurring on several levels: associative (such as feelings of order, disorder, neatness, or dirt), acoustic (silence, noise, or rhythm), and optical (the form, size, and illumination of the room).68 Although Barshch examined different experiments of Féré, such as the dynamogenic effects of alternating colored and white light and the relationship between the dynamogeneity of colors and the time of the day, he was particularly interested in ergography, hoping to offer Soviet architects a system of dynamogenic properties of colors.69 Red, he established, was the most dynamogenic at the beginning, but then quickly lost its power; orange and yellow had a constant and permanent effect; green provided moderate stimulation at the beginning and maintained a steady positive effect afterward; blue and violet initially exerted a depressing effect but could defer fatigue if used for a long period of time.

Barshch’s research complemented the exploration of the psychological effects of color that Scheper and Borchert had conducted in Germany.70 But whereas the German designers initiated the standardization and rationalization of wall-painting, defining its subject as physiological, Barshch’s program integrated their program with labor management: by reacting to the “color screens,” the dweller of the Narkomfin was conducting an economically important work. The difference between the Germans’ mechanicism and the more holistic and simultaneously economic aspirations pertinent to Soviet functionalism was only the first among a series of tensions that would soon lead to Scheper’s departure and the dissolution of Malyarstroy as an independent artistic center.

The Limits of Objectivity

The so-called Typen-Streit, a formative debate for modernist architecture between Hermann Muthesius, who was supported by Ostwald, and Henry van der Velde at the 1914 meeting of the German Werkbund, had raged around the question of whether architecture should embrace standardization or remain an individual, artistic work.71 Remaining true to the principles of Muthesius and Ostwald, Scheper believed that standardization became a weapon in the ethical and aesthetic crusade against individualism and, consequently, against individual creativity—in short, against the traditional notion of art, whose definition and very existence it challenged. As he had earlier done in his Bauhaus workshop, Scheper reoriented Malyarstroy’s approach to a modern synthesis of art and technology, and turned its production toward standardizable and mass-producible schemes. In 1930, in an open letter to the students of VKhUTEIN, where he taught in the academic year of 1930/31, Scheper asserted:

New necessities will create the new art. . . . Because this is what your construction needs: architects, wall-painters, furniture designers, weavers, that is, constructors, material workers, designers of form, makers of objects, the virtuosos of form—of function-related form. . . . You cannot paint academic nudes and construct the chair for the house, for the masses at the same time. You cannot allow your formal education, which you consider to be the foundation of your education in new painting, to be affected by old traditional principles, while you think about the satisfaction of new, nontraditional demands. Your formal education must be organized according to new methods that familiarize you with the elements of your work: materials, functions, the laws of color.72

This program repelled some VKhUTEIN students. P. F. Katichev, who had graduated from the painting department in 1930 and immediately began to work at Malyarstroy, quickly lost his initial enthusiasm.73 In January 1931, he initiated a public attack on Malyarstroy on the pages of the journal Za proletarskoe iskusstvo (For the Proletarian Art). In an article titled “A Functionalist Sway,” Katichev elaborated his program of technologization without standardization, summoning Soviet muralists to use paint-sprayers while working on unique projects (not unlike today’s graffiti artists). Borchert responded on the pages of Malyarnoe delo, accusing Katichev of individualism and technological and ideological incompetence: “We need people that, first of all, think rationally, economically and, of course, ‘functionally.’ Those whose working field is limited by a low horizon, dreamer-romantics that fuss over their petty ‘I’ (the price of which we know all too well), cannot be of any use to us.”74 The “functionalist” ideology of Malyarstroy, based on the principles of economy and rationality, left no place for individualism, Borchert went on, whether for the designer or for the user of architecture:

The design office of Malyarstroy develops its color schemes on the basis of scientifically verified conclusions of lighting engineering, physiology, and psychology. Departing from the data [received by] technical devices, the design office researches the basic demands of the human in the colored environment and follows them in its design work. The projects are executed with those methods that are most understandable for the builder, give the best general color impression, and are executed rationally, with the least expenditure of resources and time. It is not an “abstract play of colored planes” . . . but quite a real work, based on really existing prerequisites, because the rules of every design, and of color design in particular, are based on the needs of a human organism viewed in connection to the given means.75

In August 1931, Za proletarskoe iskusstvo published the article “Architecture and Tsvetopis’” by young artist Vladimir Kostin, written in collaboration with Hungarian-born art critic János Mácza (spelled as Ivan Matsa in Russian), renowned for his sociological perspective.76 It began by redefining wall-painting as a new artistic genre: tsvetopis’. “If one takes painting as the art of color, in a room we will have perhaps the most ‘pure,’ abstract kind of painting. It would be best to call this kind of painting tsvetopis’.” Combining the roots tsvet (color), and pis’ (from pisat’, to write or paint), this term was coined by Kostin as a counterpart to zhivopis’, painting (a word that is etymologically connected to zhizn’, life, and thus literally means “a depiction of life”) to signify a non-figurative art whose medium was not paint but color, and thus whose result was not material but psychological.77 Kostin’s tsvetopis’ echoed fotopis’, a new photographic genre based on the photogram, which was invented by El Lissitzky in the late 1920s. Fotopis’ had freed photography from its narrative content, thereby distilling it to its medium-specific core and elevating it to the status of a “true art.”78 As art, fotopis’ was “another means of affecting our conscious and our senses”—a function identical to that of interior color, which, as Lissitzky noted quoting physiologist Nikolay Pomortsev when discussing furniture design, affects cerebral visual centers and, through them, the entire body with a variety of its functions.79 Hailing Ginzburg’s definition of architecture as a combination of color screens enclosing the perceiving subject, Kostin likewise defined tsvetopis’ as a means of attaining psychological affect.80

However, Kostin went further, supplementing this psychologism with Mácza’s Marxist sociological aesthetics. Each social group, Kostin argued, had its own psychological response to color, based on its ethical values and ideological associations. Thus, a pink room and an orange lampshade “arouse in a philistine a certain feeling of satisfaction, coziness and repose, whereas in a person with a stronger ideological mindset the same room provokes only a feeling of contempt—not to mention that the color of the red flag agitates the fascist like a lash of whip, whereas in a proletarian it arouses the feeling of class solidarity and might.” Moreover, a color could evoke conflicting connotations even within the same group: “the same fascist, for example, could very much like the red wallpaper of a female boudoir or the red blouse of his mistress.”81 This approach had been promoted by Vladimir Friche’s influential Sociology of Art (1930), whose chapter on color in art, in turn, extensively drew on Ostwald Spengler’s observations in The Decline of the West, about the connection between the culture of the epoch and the chromatic choices of painters.82 Yet, neither reliance on Friche nor Mácza’s revisions could help the article’s fate. It was declared “a characteristic document of mechanistic views in art criticism, right opportunism in left clothing, theoretical substantiation of the replacement of art with technology.”83 In August 1931, Stalinist critic I. Amov closed the debate by returning wall-painting to individual artistic work and even unskilled craftsmanship: Kostin’s deliberations about the psychological and physiological effects of color were, he declared, “completely scholastic and bourgeois.” Instead, wall-painting had to express “a concrete idea”—or simply cover the building’s walls.84

Back in Leningrad, in 1932, Maria Ender made an attempt to salvage Matyushin’s physiological theory of color combinations in the preface that she wrote for his Handbook of Color, which came out that year.85 Spengler-Friche’s theory, she argued, treated color as an isolated and simplified phenomenon: for example, when associating yellow and red with festivity and the market. Meanwhile, in painting, the color of the used pigment was often different from the perceived color of the depicted object, and this psychological impression was frequently determined by the chromatic context. It was this understanding of the context that the color theories of Ostwald and Friche missed, and that, she hoped, secured the relevance of Matyushin’s work even within the changed political and aesthetic conditions. Although her call for the appreciation of the chromatic environment (sreda, a notion rooted in life sciences, from which it was borrowed by social critique) was repeated by Mácza the following year, the importance of the hand-painted Handbook, which came out with a minimal print run, and with it, of Matyushin’s color theory, for the practice of Soviet wall-painting remained marginal.86

Despite the fact that the debate ended with a seeming victory of figurative monumental art, the concept of wall-painting as a field endowed with an economic purpose (and consequently, of the perceiving subject as bioeconomic), which was developed at Malyarstroy, persisted—moreover, the economic perspective on wall-painting informed later Soviet aesthetics. As new, social, approaches to psychology gained importance in the Soviet Union, physiological and cerebral functions came to be seen in their more holistic context. One such influential approach, activity theory, was initiated by the circle of Lev Vygotsky and continued in the 1930s by the Kharkiv school of psychology (most notably, by Alexey Leontyev), exploring hierarchies of psychological processes.87 According to Leontyev, “the concept of activity is necessarily bound up with the concept of motive. . . . ‘Unmotivated’ activity is not activity that has no motive, but activity with a subjectively and objectively hidden motive.”88 Connecting all physical and mental phenomena into a unified system oriented toward the end goal, Leontyev’s hierarchy began as activity at the most general and conscious level; it was subdivided into actions consisting of operations, which in turn were divided into functions. Similarly, when in 1933 Mácza published his own article on color in painting, he argued that the formal and material aspects of color are explained through its role as an instrument of solving social problems.89 It was such social potential that now endowed wall-painting with the status of art and that—in contrast to the Bauhaus’s mechanicism—imbued it with a humanist content. In a lecture that he gave to a group of wall-painters in 1936 Boris Ender highlighted the connection between the unconscious, physiological process of color perception and higher, conscious, and socially meaningful activity:

My duty to you, specialists dealing with color, is to help you eliminate the colorful chaos, with which our life is still littered. . . . Let color become a building material in our construction of socialism. Imagine that in a factory, walls, machines, production clothes are not only given a special color, but these colors are combined in a way that increases working productivity. Imagine that in hospitals walls, curtains, blankets, furniture are harmonized in such a way that the patient cures sooner and better. That in a theater, the impression increases due to color design in a way that is not yet practiced. The same in a book, in a First-of-May rally, on a railway station, in the metro. I argue that you must organize color.90

This organizing potential remained wall-painting’s most long-lasting legacy.

This potential was last explored in 1935–38 in the work of the Laboratory of Color Perception under the Narkompros (directed by Nikolay Norman [Troitsky] and patronized by the secretary of the Union of Soviet Architects Vladimir Dedyukhin), which employed the psychologist and author of books on color in architecture Sergey Alekseev. Collaborating with several schools in Moscow and Podolsk, the laboratory’s specialists painted the walls of classrooms in particular colors and later subjected the students to “a comprehensive medical examination.” After that, using “specially developed methods and forms, psychologists conducted conversations and interviews with teachers and students of [all] grades from the first to the tenth. Their opinions and impressions were processed, analyzed, and discussed with specialists in pedagogy.” This work subsequently turned into “a broad study, delegated to a whole range of research institutions.”91 The introduction of the second, sociological step of data analysis revealed the desire to overcome the mechanicism of the “German” approach—yet it, too, did little to help wall-painting’s fate. The second, physical, defeat of Soviet wall-painting research proved to be final: in 1938, both Dedyukhin and Norman were subjected to repression.92 Finally, Borchert, who became a Soviet citizen, was arrested in 1942, during the Second World War, to die in a labor camp two years later.

From Matyushin’s eccentric experiments in expanded seeing to Malyarstroy’s interest in ergography, wall-painting (just like standardization, as discussed in the previous chapter) in industrially backward Russia developed as a more theoretical, perception-oriented discipline than its international counterparts, which were immediately related to industrial production. Even as a tool of standardization, as the example of the Narkomfin shows, Soviet wall-painting focused on regulating of subjectivity rather than on the unification of production. Ironically, this theoretical bias and this focus on psychological perception was a reversal of the program of industrialization, which had led to the invitation of the German specialists to Moscow. But while, helpless in the face of Russia’s technological backwardness, the “German” modernist approach to wall-painting as the standardization of colors and their relationships did not last long, the organizational concerns that were developed at Malyarstroy persisted well into the 1930s.

Although the painting schemes, as well as the residential Narkomfin block, remained experimental models, the story of wall-painting as an instrument of psychological control did not end. In the late 1960s, it was revived in the wake of the emergence of environmental psychology and still continues to inform architecture.93 Today, the seeds sown by the Narkomfin building ripened not only in the architecture of the “neo-avant-garde,” but in such ostensibly architecturally insignificant projects as schools, hospitals, and prisons, as scientists continue to explore the potential of color for improving outcomes in learning, healing, and correction.94 Famously, the Baker-Miller pink color is still used in detention centers across the globe (most recently, in the German-speaking countries). It is named after the directors of the Naval Correctional Facility in Seattle, where in the 1970s the psychologist Alexander Schauss conducted research on the impact of color upon human emotions and claimed that pink exercises a calming effect.95 The importance of color for these canonic examples of what Michel Foucault called disciplinary institutions—modern spaces of normalization—reveals the disciplining aspirations in both Malyarstroy’s social utopia and contemporary society. And yet, an important difference pertains: whereas the use of color in contemporary institutions is limited to optimizing physiological and behavioral functions, for Malyarstroy, scientifically determined color opened a path to imbuing behavior with an external, universally significant goal.