Background
Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin was born on December 28, 1885 in Moscow, Russian Federation and grew up in Kharkov. His father, Evgraph Nikiforovich Tatlin, was a railway engineer and his mother, Nadezhda Nikolaevna Tatlina, a poet.
Moscow, Russian Federation
Vladimir Tatlin studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1902 - 1904.
Vladimir Tatlin, 1911
Tatlin in front of the model of the Monument to the Third International, 1920
Vladimir Tatlin, Paris, 1914
Tatlin wearing a coat of his own design, and standing next to an energy efficient stove he designed, circa 1919.
Penza, Penza District, Russian Federation
Vladimir Tatlin studied at the Penza Art School of K. Savitsky from 1904 - 1909.
Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin was born on December 28, 1885 in Moscow, Russian Federation and grew up in Kharkov. His father, Evgraph Nikiforovich Tatlin, was a railway engineer and his mother, Nadezhda Nikolaevna Tatlina, a poet.
From the end of 1902 to 1904 Tatlin attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. He then studied at the Penza School of Art from 1904 to 1909, where his inspiration to create purposeful and socially-relevant art started. After 1910 Tatlin returned to the Moscow School of Painting to study with Korovin and Serov, Russian Post-Impressionist painters.
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.
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.
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.
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. He met Picasso, Lipchitz, and Archipenko. 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. 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. 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 1930 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.
Tabla Number 1
1917Portrait of the artist
1912Woman's Portrait
1933Flowers
1940Flower-Piece
Leningrad
1936Board Number 1 (Staro-Basmannaya Street)
1916A Skull on the Open Book
1950Composition (the month of May)
1916Counter relief
Model
1913Forest
1913Relief
1913Female bather
1930The Sailor (Self Portrait)
1912Monument to the Third International
1920Sketch for stage set, Glinka's Ivan Susanin
Artist's model
1910The Fishmonger
1911Tatlin Relief 2
1914Model of the monument III International
1920Meat
1947Sketch for stage set, Glinka's King Life
Quotations: "The word itself is a building unit, material a unit of organized space".
Quotes from others about the person
Nikolay Punin: "I consider Tatlin to be the only creative force capable of pushing art beyond the trenches of old positional lines. What is his strength? - in simplicity, perfectly clean and organic. He is a Master from head to toe, from the most involuntary reflex to the most conscious act. Amazing, absolutely unprecedented skill!"
Maria Alexandrovna Geintse was Tatlin's first wife. She was a biologist and medical doctor. They had a son, Vladimir.