Vladimir Tatlin

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(b Kharkiv, 12 Dec 1885; d Novodevichy, Moscow, 31 May 1953). Ukrainian painter, designer, sculptor and teacher, active mainly in Russia.

The son of a railway engineer and a poet, he attended school in Kharkiv and trained as a merchant sea cadet, visiting Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, Asia Minor, Africa, Greece and Italy. He began his painting career as an icon painter in Moscow, but he subsequently attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1902-3), studying under Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov, before moving to the Penza School of Art (1904-10), where his tutors were Ivan Goryushkin-Sorokopudov (1873-1954) and Aleksey Afanas'ev (1850-1920). During the summer months he made copies of Russian church frescoes. This awareness of traditional painting techniques complemented the adventurous and Westernized art of his Moscow tutors Korovin and Serov. Between 1908 and 1911 he also became friendly with the Burlyuk brothers and Mikhail Larionov, who were instrumental in the evolution of Russian Futurism, the iconoclastic, absurdist, visionary development in Russian art and letters that arose independently of Italian Futurism. Introduced to the most adventurous exhibition groups and salons, including the World of Art and the Golden Fleece, Tatlin learnt rapidly about recent developments in Western European art. He also had access to the collections in Moscow of Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, whose acquisitions of works by Monet, Gauguin, C?zanne and the Nabis were complemented with recent paintings by Picasso and Matisse. The newest exhibition groups seized upon recent European developments from Paris and Munich, while simultaneously debating the independence of Russian cultural traditions of folk art and icon painting. Tatlin exhibited with many of the avant-garde groups, including the Jack of Diamonds, the Union of Youth and the DONKEY'S TAIL group, which was aggressively Russian in outlook and was inspired by non-Western, primitivist art, folk art and icon painting. Tatlin's works employed compass and ruler to construct an unconventional picture space. Between 1911 and 1915 Tatlin worked in Moscow alongside the painters Aleksandr Vesnin, Nadezhda Udal'tsova, Lyubov' Popova, Valentina Khodasevich (1894-1968) and Robert Fal'k, all of whom responded to the Cubist and Futurist ideas debated and published in the journal Soyuz Molodyozhi of the Union of Youth, with whom Tatlin was exhibiting in 1913. Tatlin was the first illustrator, at this time, of the key Russian Futurist poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh (Mirskontsa, 'The world backwards'; Moscow, 1912) and of the revolutionary painter-poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (Trebnik troikh, 'The missal of the three', 1913). In addition he had begun to work on stage designs, some of which he exhibited in 1912 at an exhibition at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture along with his paintings The Fishmonger (1911; Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.) and Sailor (see fig. 1).

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin (1885-1953) was a Russian avant garde artist whose model of the "Monument to the Third International" remains the main symbol of Constructivism.

In years to come, Vladimir Tatlin may be viewed as one of the greatest visionary artists of the 20th century. He was born in Moscow and grew up in Kharkov. His father was a railway engineer and his mother a poet, their professions and outlook representative of some of the new middle-class mobility found in late 19th-century Russia.

In 1902 Tatlin "ran away to sea" for a year and traveled abroad in Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Libya. From the end of 1902 to 1904 he attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. He continued his art studies from 1904 to 1910 at the Penza Art School and studied under Goroshkin-Sorokopudov and the lesser-known Peredvizhnik ("Wanderers"-social realist) Afanasyev. Tatlin received his diploma in 1908 as a painter. In Penza, Tatlin had established a close relationship with the Rayonist painter Mikhail Larionov and his wife, the primitivist and cubo-futurist painter Natalia Goncharova. He exhibited with them in Odessa in December 1910 in the Second Izbedskii Salon exhibition and in "The Donkey's Tail" Exhibition in Moscow, April 1912. Larionov had a significant impact on Tatlin, especially in steering the young artist toward Russian themes.

Tatlin also established close ties with the painter David Burlyuk and the poet Khlebnikov. At the same time, however, he began to move in other directions. He exhibited with the St. Petersburg "Union of Youth" group in 1911 and in the Knave of Diamonds Exhibition in 1913, which also included David and Vladimir Burlyuk, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Falk, Alexandra Exter, Ilya Mashkov, and others. Tatlin's early works were often primitive, loose in style, and focused on form, with little attention paid to background.

Tatlin's most famous early work was the painting The Fishmonger (1911), which emphasizes a great swirl of arcs and created a great deal of movement on the canvas. One of the results of the Knave of Diamonds Exhibition was an intensive debate that ensued between David Burlyuk, who was strongly supportive of Western art, and Natalia Goncharova, who favored Russian themes. The debate led to a split and the formation of "The Donkey's Tail, " a rival group emphasizing Russian and folk idioms, with which Tatlin identified.

After 1910 Tatlin returned to the Moscow School of Painting to study with Korovin and Serov, Russian Post-Impressionist painters. During 1911 Tatlin organized a teaching studio in Moscow which provided him the opportunity to meet avant garde artists Alexander Vesnin and Liubov Popova. Tatlin also exhibited in "The World of Art" show in 1912-1913 and in "Contemporary Painting" from 1912 to 1914. He became a book illustrator for futurist works by Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, and Mayakovsky.

Tatlin's works of this period include the painting Nude (1913), which marks a blend of Western avant garde and Russian tradition. In the realm of theatrical set design, Tatlin worked on Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar and Tomahsevsky's play Tsar Maximillian and his unruly son Adolf. Both were strong in folk motif and abstraction.

In 1913 Tatlin went to Paris; met Picasso, Lipchitz, and Archipenko; and, upon his return to Russia, began experimenting in sculpture. Picasso's cubist reliefs had a significant impact upon him. The result was a series of three-dimensional painterly reliefs. These were displayed at the "First Exhibition of Painterly Reliefs" at his studio in 1914 and at the "Tramway V" Exhibition in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1915. From painterly reliefs, Tatlin moved into "counter-reliefs, " which were exhibited at the exhibition "0.10" in 1916 in Petrograd and "The Store" in Moscow during the same year. Tatlin constantly experimented with the idea of extending space, as real forms came forward from a solid base. Composition became a process of construction, and construction itself was related to the materials employed in the creative process. This new type of "constructivist" art was viewed as oriented toward materials, and hence away from personal taste and toward an impersonal role for the artist. On the issue of form and construction, Tatlin moved from "counter-reliefs" executed on paper to "corner-reliefs, " which were sculptures suspended in the corners of rooms.

After the Russian Revolution, Tatlin became the head of the Moscow branch of IZO Narkompros (Visual Arts Department of the Commissariat for People's Enlightenment). One of his charges was to develop Lenin's Plan for Monumental Propaganda. This provided the inspiration for the "Monument to the Third International." Tatlin also taught at the Moscow State Free Art Studios and from 1919 to 1921 in Petrograd at the State Free Art Studios. He opened his own studio, known as the Studio of Volume, Material, and Construction.

During November 1920 Tatlin exhibited a model of the "Monument to the Third International" in Petrograd at the former Academy of Arts. A month later the model was moved to Moscow for exhibition at the 8th Congress of the Soviets. Although the monument, designed to straddle the Neva River in Petrograd, was never built, it has remained an inspiration for monumental architecture and remains the main symbol of Constructivism. The basic idea of the structure, according to Nikolai Punin, one of Tatlin's associates, was to create a monumental construction utilizing architectural, sculptural, and painterly principles. It was dedicated to the branch of the new government designed to promote international revolution. The monument was a soaring and spiral-like skeletal steel structure, sometimes called a modern Tower of Babel. Within the steel structure were three large glass spaces held in place by a complex system of pivots and mechanisms which allowed them to move at different speeds. The lower space, a cube, was a building for the International's annual meetings and rotated once a year. The second building was a pyramid, which revolved at one revolution a month. This was designed to house the executive divisions and secretariat of the International. The upper building, a cylinder, rotated once a day and was to house means of disseminating information - newspapers, printshops, telegraph, large projectors, radio transmitters, and viewing screens. The tower itself was both sculpture and architecture.

In 1921 Tatlin attempted to design new types of workshops and was subsequently instrumental in setting up Petrograd GINKhUK (State Institute for Artistic Culture) and directed the Department of Material Culture, which was concerned with development of new materials and their application to the new social organization. Tatlin designed new workers' clothing and an oven.

In May 1923 Tatlin produced Khebnikov's play Zangezi. This enterprise marked a unique achievement, as Tatlin worked with the phonetician Lev Yakubinsky in an attempt to unify material constructions and word constructions in a theater environment. Tatlin wrote that "the word itself is a building unit, material a unit of organized space." The fusing of the two elements was supposed to create an architectural state on the state, a revolutionary event.

During the period 1925 to 1927 Tatlin moved to Kiev and worked at the Department of Theater, Cinema, and Photography at the Kiev Art School. In 1927 he returned to Moscow to work at VkhUTEIN (Higher State Artistic and Technical Institute) and taught construction of everyday objects. From 1930 to 1933 Tatlin worked in his Scientific and Experimental Laboratory under Narkompros. Here, he conceived his "flying machine project, " Letatlin, which was reminiscent of Da Vinci's "Flying Machine, " the name being taken partially from his own and from the Russian letat, "to fly." Tatlin, however, was criticized highly by new official critics and artists for this research, as it was viewed as a solo venture, opposed to the cooperative spirit of the new "official" Socialist Realism. Tatlin, however, defended his gliders as an experimental work that promoted thinking about new variations in forms, which avoided the monotony of contemporary manufactured goods. He indicated that the airplane was the consummate object for artistic composition, since it was a complicated form that would become an everyday object. During 1932 and 1933 and variants of Letatlin were exhibited at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

By the end of the 1930s Tatlin returned to figurative painting and spent most of his time in theater design. He was discredited after 1933, when Socialist Realism became the guiding philosophy for Soviet art. Unfortunately, very few of his artistic constructions survived and most that have been exhibited recently have been re-creations from original drawings. A new model of the "Monument to the Third International" was built for the Los Angeles County Museum and Smithsonian Institution's Constructivist show of 1980.

Tatlin died in 1953 from food poisoning, and his passing was unheralded. He is now being rediscovered in his native country, as glasnost's attempt to analyze the past has led to a close examination of the avant garde before 1933.

Further Reading

The most comprehensive works on Tatlin are John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant Garde (1983) and Russian Revolutionary Art (1979), and Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova, Tatlin (1989).

Works that blend Tatlin's ideas on art into the general framework of Constructivism and the avant garde include Stephen Bann (editor), The Tradition of Constructivism (1972); Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman (editors), The Avant Garde in Russia, 1910-1930 (1980); John Bowlt (editor), Russian Art of the Avant Garde: Theory and Criticism (1973); Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (1983); and Kestutis Paul Zygas, Form Follows Form: Source Imagery of Constructive Architecture, 1917-1925 (1981).

Additional Sources

Milner, John, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian avant-garde, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

A central figure in the development of Russian Constructivism, artist, designer, and theorist Tatlin was born into a family with an engineer father and poet mother. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1902 to 1903 before moving on to the School of Fine Arts at Penza from 1905 to 1910, when he returned to Moscow. Over succeeding years he became increasingly involved with the Russian artistic avant-garde and its growing interest in Futurism and Cubism. He was acquainted with the latter at first hand in Paris in 1913 and soon began experimenting in three-dimensional abstract reliefs, some of which were shown in the Futurist Exhibition in Petrograd in 1915. In 1917 this interest in materials and form evolved further in a commission for the interior decoration of the Café Pittoresque, a bohemian avant-garde Moscow theatre-cabaret, on which he worked alongside Rodchenko and Yakulov in the construction of a dynamic environment of abstract forms in wood, metal, and cardboard. A leading artistic figure in the post-Revolutionary period, he became involved in Soviet propaganda, a highly significant project being the gigantic Monument to the Third International, commissioned in 1919. It was intended to be a massively tall, dynamic spiral structure, built in glass and iron, with core elements revolving at different speeds (annually, monthly, and weekly). Each had distinct functions, such as conference halls, meeting rooms, and information centre that, combined with new forms, technologies, and materials, symbolized the utopian aspirations of the immediate post-Revolution years. Revolutionary messages were to be projected into the sky and the news and propaganda broadcast by radio and loudspeakers. Although the project never materialized beyond scale models, its use of industrial materials and contemporary technologies revealed the utilitarian ethos that increasingly characterized Tatlin's work. This was evidenced in his 1920 Programme of the Productivist Group and his 1920s designs for practical and ergonomically designed workers' clothing, ceramics, metalware, and furniture. He taught industrial design at the Vkhutemas in Moscow from 1927 to 1931 but, following its liquidation in 1931, together with a marked change in the political and aesthetic climate, returned to practise in the fine arts.

Ukranian painter and sculptor. Influenced by Cubism and Futurism he became one of the main protagonists of Constructivism from 1913. His project (only realized as a large model) for a monument to the Third International (1919–20) consisted of a steel double-helical structure over 400 metres high, with rotating glass buildings containing administrative, legislative, and propaganda facilities for the Komintern. Intended as a symbol of progress and technology (based on images of fairground structures and oil-derricks, and painted bright red), this proposal became a paradigm for architects such as Leonidov, El Lissitzky, and Vesnin, and was admired in avant-garde circles in the West. It has also been a potent image for those associated with Deconstructivism.

Bibliography

• Andersen (ed.) (1968)
• J. Harten (ed.) (1993)
• Milner (1983)
• Placzek (ed.) (1982)
• Punina & Rakitin (1994)
• Strigalev & J. Harten (eds.) (1993)
• Jane Turner (1996)
• Zhadova (ed.) (1988)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin (Russian: Владимир Евграфович Татлин) (December 28 [O.S. December 16] 1885 – May 31, 1953) was a Russian and Soviet painter and architect. With Kazimir Malevich he was one of the two most important figures in the Russian avant-garde art movement of the 1920s, and he later became the most important artist in the Constructivist movement. He is most famous for his attempts to create the giant tower, The Monument to the Third International.

Biography

Tatlin was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the son of a railway engineer and a poet. He worked as a merchant sea cadet and spent some time abroad. He began his art career as an icon painter in Moscow, and attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He was also a professional musician-bandurist, and performed as such at the Paris World Fair in 1906.

Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin's Tower. Planned in 1920, the monument, was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris (the Monument to the Third International was a third taller at 1,300 feet high). Inside the iron-and-steel structure of twin spirals, the design envisaged three building blocks, covered with glass windows, which would rotate at different speeds (the first one, a cube, once a year; the second one, a pyramid, once a month; the third one, a cylinder, once a day). High prices prevented Tatlin from executing the plan, and no building such as this was erected in his day.

Tatlin was also regarded as a progenitor of Russian post-Revolutionary Constructivist art with his pre-Revolutionary counter-reliefs — structures made of wood and iron for hanging in wall corners. He conceived these sculptures in order to question the traditional idea of painting, though he did not regard himself as a Constructivist and objected to many of the movement's ideas. Later prominent constructivists included Varvara Stepanova, Alexander Rodchenko, Manuel Rendón Seminario, Joaquín Torres García, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo.

Although colleagues at the beginning of their careers, Tatlin and Malevich quarrelled fiercely and publicly at the time of the 'Zero-Ten' (0.10) exhibition [1915:long before the birth of 'Constructivism'], apparently over the 'suprematist' works Malevich exhibited there. This led Malevich to develop his ideas further in the city of Vitebsk, where he found a school called UNOVIS (Champions of the new art). Suprematism came to light in 1915 at the 0.10 exhibition, one of the main shows of Russian avant-garde, also called "the last futurist exhibition".

Tatlin also dedicated himself to the study of clothes, objects and so on. At the end of his life he started to research bird-flight, in order to provide human beings with facilities that would allow them to pursue one of the great dreams of humanity: to fly.

Tatlin was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow.

References

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