Vladimir Tatlin

Vladimir Tatlin founded Constructivism and designed a monument that was never built and never forgotten. Born in Kharkiv in 1885, he ran away to sea as a young man and worked as a merchant sailor, an experience visible in his lifelong interest in rigging, tension and structure. He trained as an icon painter and at the Moscow School of Painting. In 1914 he visited Picasso's studio in Paris and saw his constructions in cardboard and sheet metal. He returned and began making counter-reliefs — assemblages of iron, wood, glass and wire, hung in corners and suspended on wires, with no representational subject at all. They abandoned the frame, the pedestal and the depiction of anything, and are among the first genuinely abstract three-dimensional works. His principle was the culture of materials: the artist should work from the properties of iron, glass and wood rather than imposing a form on them, and should function as an engineer rather than a decorator. He supported the revolution and worked in the Soviet arts administration. In 1919-20 he designed the Monument to the Third International — a leaning double helix of iron, taller than the Eiffel Tower, containing four glass volumes revolving at different rates, one per year, one per month, one per day, one per hour. It was displayed as a model. There was not enough steel in Russia to build it, and there probably never was a workable engineering solution. He spent years on Letatlin, a human-powered flying machine modelled on insect wings, which never flew. Constructivism was suppressed under socialist realism, and he worked as a stage designer until his death in 1953.

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