Color Plates
Plate 1. The cover of The Science of Life by H. G. Wells, G. P. Wells, and Julian Huxley (1929–30) illustrates the evolutionist notions of life and the human.
Plate 2. Ladovsky’s former students developed an elaborate theory of composition, which was based on an analysis of rows. This unfinished scheme by Viktor Balikhin illustrates “The Application of the Rows of Properties to the Organization of Frontal Plane (Dynamics, Unity, and the Limitations of the Vertical).” The top row illustrates “Types of Relationships” (left to right: equality; the predominance of horizontality; the predominance of verticality; neutral divisions [the next three diagrams]; a two-partite division). The second row illustrates “Types of Regular Divisions” and metric rhythm created by number, size, and color. The third row illustrates metric rhythm created by color and size. In the fourth row, rhythm is created by modifications of intervals and size. The fifth row uses proportion and geometry for the creation of rhythm and introduces elements of dynamic. The sixth row creates rhythm with size, color, and the speed of transformation. The last colored row relies on chiaroscuro and relief. Pencil drawing. Courtesy of the Museum of the Moscow Institute of Architecture.
Plate 3. El Lissitzky’s Tatlin at Work on the Monument to the Third International (1922) can be read as a symbolic self-portrait that illustrates Lissitzky’s views about the relationship between art and mathematics as well as about monocular perspective. The collage was used as an illustration to Ilya Ehrenburg’s Six Stories with Easy Endings (Il’ia Erenburg, Shest’ povestei o legkikh kontsakh) (Moscow: Gelikon, 1922). Courtesy of the Grosvenor Gallery, London.
Plate 4. The first of the sixteen analytical illustrated tables (posters) that supplemented Georgy Krutikov’s VKhUTEIN diploma project “The City of the Future” (1929) explored “The Visual Deformation of a Dynamic Form,” showing how movement produced what Lissitzky called imaginary space. Courtesy of the A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow (PIa 11200/1).
Plate 5. Georgy Krutikov, “General View,” part of “The City of the Future,” VKhUTEIN diploma project (1929). This rendering of the city of the future seen from space explores Lissitzky’s concept of imaginary space and Krutikov’s experimental and analytical research of the visual effects of movement and light. Courtesy of the A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow (PIa 11201/4).
Plate 6. Lissitzky’s color sketch depicting one of the horizontal skyscrapers (to be located at the Nikitsky Gates Square) illustrates his proposition that “the introduction of color for differentiation of each individual skyscraper will enhance its orientational potential” (Izvestia ASNOVA, no. 1 [1926]: 3). Courtesy of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (RS-1923).
Plate 7. Digital model by Pierluigi D’Acunto and Juan José Castellón González illustrates the mechanics of the space-meter’s work. Courtesy of the authors.
Plate 8. Visually resembling Klein’s diagrammatic multitudes, Finite Format 04, a series of watercolors by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen for Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017, similarly erases form while replacing it not by type but by format. Courtesy pezo von ellrichshausen.
Plate 9. Maria Ender’s table (Table VI. “The change of color spot and color background in time, within the eyes closed”) illustrates her teacher Mikhail Matyushin’s theory of the linking color. Courtesy of the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg (80449/12-osn).
Plate 10. In his hand-colored set of tables, The Handbook of Color: A Pattern of the Convertibility of Color Combinations (Spravochnik po tsvetu: Zakonomernost’ izmeniaemosti tsvetovykh sochetanii [Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv, 1932]), Mikhail Matyushin suggested applying his theory of linking color to interior design. Photograph by the author.
Plate 11. Translated into Russian in 1926, Wilhelm Ostwald’s Farbkunde (1923) became the standard textbook of color theory at both VKhUTEMAS and Malyarstroy. Pictured here is Ostwald’s one-tone triangle from the Russian edition of Farbkunde. This color plate was produced at VKhUTEMAS, while the dyes and the printing technique were developed by VKhUTEMAS professor and chemist N. V. Turkin.
Plate 12. Hinnerk Scheper and Malyarstroy’s color scheme for the Narkomfin building circulation areas utilizes the Bauhaus experience of the use of color for orientation (most important, Scheper’s color scheme for the Bauhaus building in Dessau). The scheme was published in Maliarnoe delo (color supplement to no. 3–4, 1930); original in the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Courtesy of the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
Plate 13. The special issue of the constructivist journal Sovremennaya arkhitektura on architectural polychromy (1929) was richly illustrated with the works of Fernand Léger (the only artist whose work was represented in the issue). Ginzburg, the journal’s editor, explained that he saw Léger’s work not as easel painting but as an analytical exercise in exploring how form can be expressed by color. From Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1929): 59.
Plate 14. Moisei Ginzburg’s early interior color schemes employed a Léger-like palette of contrasting primary colors and black. This project of interior coloration for an office in Ginzburg’s Government Building in Alma-Ata (contemporary Almaty, Kazakhstan; together with Ignaty Milinis) demonstrates a black ceiling and a black external wall facing a bright yellow wall, while the two remaining walls are painted blue. Project published in Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1929): 69.
Plate 15. Hinnerk Scheper and Malyarstroy’s cold scheme was to be used in apartments of type K: three-room apartments for families with children. The scheme was published in Maliarnoe delo (color supplement to no. 3–4, 1930); original in the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Courtesy of the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
Plate 16. A 1979 watercolor drawing by Elena Ovsyannikova shows the dining room in the “penthouse” Narkomfin apartment, which belonged to Ginzburg’s patron, the minister of finance Nikolay Milyutin. Courtesy of Elena Ovsyannikova.
Plate 17. The warm scheme was to be applied in the apartments of type F. Scheper presented it with two more traditional central perspectival drawings. The scheme was published in Maliarnoe delo (color supplement to no. 3–4, 1930); original in the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Courtesy of the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
Plate 18. This quasi-perspectival diagrammatic construction 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. According to Wilhelm von Bezold, if the smaller square was orange, the figure was perceived as a pyramid, while a blue smaller square turned it into a receding space. Scheper employed the same compositional structure in his drawing for the warm scheme to support the spatial effect of the white outer wall (white was considered by psychologists an equivalent of blue in its potential to expand space). Diagram reproduced in Wilhelm von Bezold, Die Farbenlehre im Hinblick auf Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1874), Tafel VI.
Plate 19. At VKhUTEIN, the notion of fatigue redefined the artistic discourse about color. A “Practicum of Color Theory” student sketchbook by Alexander Lyushin (VKhUTEIN, 1928–30) contains exercises on observing the effects of color fatigue (left) and Ostwald’s color triangle (right). Author’s photograph. Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (950052).
Plate 20. An illustrated children’s book by artists Valery Alfeevsky and Tatyana Lebedeva (Mavrina) presents an idealized vision of the park as a space of personal activation. This overview shows a variety of activities performed in the park. Park kultury i otdykha: Risunki Alfeevskogo i Lebedevoi (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930).