Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin
b. Moscow, 1885;
d. Moscow, 1953.

Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin was a Russian avant-garde artist whose work with materials was a major inspiration to the Constructivist movement in architecture and design. Tatlin trained at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1902-4) and at Penza Art School (1904-10), often breaking his studies to work as a sailor on merchant ships. From 1908 he became increasingly involved with avant-garde painters and futurist writers in Moscow, Odessa and St Petersburg, exhibiting widely and designing for the theatre. In 1913-14 he started to make and exhibit abstract compositions he called “Selections of materials”. After the 1917 Revolution he became deeply involved in official work for the new Soviet Education Commissariat (Narkompros), using artists and art as a force for public awakening. At the same time he was developing his own theory and aesthetic of a socially useful art of “real materials in real space” in Moscow and Petrograd/Leningrad “institutes” of avant-garde art and design research. His quasi-architectural project of 1919 for a Monument (actually, headquarters) of the Third Communist International became one of the canonical images of Russian avant-garde architecture and of international Modernism. During the 1920s Tatlin taught variously in Petrograd/Leningrad, Kiev and the metal- and woodworking faculty of the Moscow Vkhutemas. The courses propagated his theory of “the culture of materials” as a design principle based on the inner behavioural and loading capacities of material rather than formal abstractions. During the anti-modernist years of the 1930s and after, he lived in obscurity in Moscow, painting and further developing his flying-machine project.

Major buildings / works:
“Counter-reliefs: Selections of materials”, 1913-17.
Monument to the Third International, project, 1919.
“Letatlin” flying machine, 1929-32 and thereafter.

Bibliography:
T. Andersen (ed.), Vladimir Tatlin (catalogue), Stockholm, 1968.
L. A. Zhadova (ed.), Tatlin: Complete Works and Documents, Budapest, 1984, London, 1988.