Tatlin, Vladimir

Tatlin, Vladimir (1885–1953). Russian painter, designer, and maker of abstract constructions, the founder of Constructivism. He was born in Kharkov in the Ukraine, the son of a railway engineer. His mother, a poet, died when he was 2 and he had an unhappy childhood, disliking his father—a stern disciplinarian—as well as his stepmother. These circumstances left him with a distrustful nature and he was later constantly suspicious of rivals such as Malevich. Tatlin's training was somewhat sporadic, and for some years he combined art with occasional voyages as a merchant seaman to earn his living; many of his early pictures are of maritime subjects, notably The Sailor (Russian Museum, St Petersburg, 1911–12), which is a self-portrait. His main period of study was at the art school in Penza, 1904–10, after which he enrolled at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. From this time he exhibited in several avant-garde exhibitions, experimenting with a number of styles, and he was closely associated with Goncharova and Larionov.

In 1914 (not 1913 as long believed) Tatlin visited Berlin and Paris. He haunted Picasso's studio and on his return to Russia began making a series of abstract Painted Reliefs, Relief Constructions, and Corner Reliefs inspired by Picasso's sculptural experiments. Very few of these revolutionary works survive, most being known only from photographs. He used a variety of materials—tin, glass, wood, plaster, etc., and Camilla Grey writes: ‘For the first time in Tatlin's constructions we find real space introduced as a pictorial factor; for the first time inter-relationships of a number of different materials were examined and coordinated’ (The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922, 1962). After the October Revolution of 1917, Tatlin's constructions made from ‘real materials in real space’ were felt to be in accordance with the new ‘culture of materials’ and he threw himself wholeheartedly into the demand for socially oriented art, declaring: ‘The events of 1917 in the social field were already brought about in our art in 1914, when material, volume and construction were laid as its basis.’ He became one of the most prominent figures in the art world and in 1918 he was made director of the Moscow section of IZO Narkompros. In 1919 he was commissioned to design the Monument to the Third International (the organization set up by the Bolsheviks to co-ordinate the activities of Communist movements throughout the world). The huge monument—in the form of a leaning, openwork, spiral tower—was intended for a position in the centre of Moscow; it was to be in glass and iron, and parts of it were to revolve. It was intended to be both functional and symbolic, housing various offices of the revolutionary government and including such features as an immense projector for throwing propaganda images onto clouds. Tatlin described it as ‘A union of purely plastic forms (painting, sculpture and architecture) for a utilitarian purpose'. A model was exhibited in December 1920 at the exhibition of the VIIIth Congress of the Soviets. Gabo condemned the design as impracticable and it was never executed (it was intended to be much bigger than the Eiffel Tower), but it is recognized as the outstanding symbol of Soviet Constructivism. (The original model has been destroyed, but there is a reconstruction in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.)

The Monument to the Third International was the culmination of Tatlin's career, and the rest of it is something of an anticlimax. He continued to be active in teaching and administration, and his own work was mainly in the field of applied art, designing furniture, workers' clothes, etc. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he devoted his energies to designing a human-powered flying machine that was a combination of bicycle and glider; he called it Letatlin (a compound of his name and the Russian verb ‘to fly'). In the early 1930s he took up painting again, working in a fairly conventional style, but his main activity from this time was theatre design. His later years were spent in lonely obscurity (in 1948 he was declared an ‘enemy of the people’ by the Communist Party, now demanding Socialist Realism in the arts.