Museum of St. Petersburg Avant-Garde (M. V. Matyushin House)

About museum

The M. V. Matyushin house-museum is located on Professor Popov Street (formerly known as Pesochnaya), which was built in the 1840s-1850s on the site of a garden. In 1912 Mikhail Vasilievich Matyushin, a pioneer of the Russian avant-garde, and his wife Elena Genrikhovna Guro, a well-known artist and writer, moved into apartment No. 12. For several decades this house was a center of cultural life in Petersburg–Petrograd–Leningrad, attracting numerous artists, musicians and writers. During the Great Patriotic War this house became a meeting place for the writers A. A. Fadeev, N. S. Tikhonov, V. M. Inber, M. A. Dudin and A. A. Kron. In December 2006 the Museum of St. Petersburg Avant-Garde was opened here, allowing a better understanding of the formation of avant-garde culture in Russia and the diversity of St. Petersburg avant-garde art of the 1910s-1930s.