In the early twentieth century, Russian avant-garde artists, largely based in St. Petersburg, turned their attention to the natural world and the need for a new, absolute art based not on the copying of nature but instead on its universal laws and organic principles [1]. Their aesthetics were informed by pantheist, neovitalist and monist ideas combined with evolutionary thought and scientific knowledge from the fields of physics, biology, physiology and psychology. Mikhail Matyushin, leader of the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde, was inspired by the German physicist Otto Lehmann’s discovery of liquid crystals.

Beginning in the 1870s, Lehmann investigated phenomena related to crystal growth and changes in crystalline substances. Certain substances—“liquid crystals” (Flüssige Kristalle)—display birefringence under polarized light. These newly discovered crystals include opposite states of rigidity and fluidity and thus radically transformed contemporary theories of crystals. Lehmann’s groundbreaking study was published in 1904 [...

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