Vladimir Tatlin
gigatos | January 30, 2022
Summary
Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin (Moscow, 28 December 1885 – Moscow, 31 May 1953) was a painter and architect. Along with Kazimir Malevich, he was the most important figure of the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s, and his name later became a hallmark of Constructivism. His most famous experiment is the Tatlin Tower.
Tatlin was a strange man even within the circle of artists. Biographically, there is much uncertainty about him. After his death he was disgraced.
The Russian Constructivists did not consider the essence of the artist to be important. Tatlin saw art as a programme with a purpose. He saw artists as having a role beyond art: historical responsibility, a sense of mission.
His life experiences also had a significant influence on his art. He also worked as a sailor and icon painter. His fascination with suspended structures and constructions in his later works stemmed from his matronly life. Tatlin relied on direct experience (probably inherited from his years as a sailor), and as a result he made everything himself: shoes, shirts, furniture, workshop fittings and more.
“Art is not a profession, it”s a job,” said Tatlin. He wanted to go back to pure prehistory and combine it with modern technique. “The past is our future”, said Kazimir Malevich.
His fascination with technology is not a representation of its technical achievements, as with the Futurists, nor a representation of urban art, as with the Berlin Dadaists. Tatlin does not glorify the machine, but transfigures it with art. He wants to liberate man from the domination of the machine, from the slavery of technology. The slogans “Art into Life” and “Art into Technique” are Tatlin”s own. He undertook the renewal of art regardless of any authority, as he saw innovation as the duty of the modern artist and the artist himself as “the initiating unit of the collective”.
Tatlin became interested in aeroplanes at an early age. He was also inspired by folk sights, folk crafts, sign painters and fairground prints. The Russian icon was a much bigger influence than Paul Cézanne or Pablo Picasso.
He was also influenced by Hlebnikov the poet. Hlebnikov confronted the harsh and inhuman reality with the dream of a beautiful future, with utopias based on a pantheistic relationship with nature and faith in scientific and technological progress, and with his own ethical perfectionism. He assembled a “Government of the Presidents of the Planet Earth” from the people he believed to be the most morally authoritative.
His family were both intellectuals and manual workers. His mother was a poetess who died when he was 2 years old, his father an engineer who went on a study trip to the United States to study the technological development there. This impressed Tatlin. His father became a nobleman and enrolled his son not in a grammar school but in a real school.
Tatlin did not receive regular professional training: from his youth he received lessons from two young artists who prepared him for enrolment at the Moscow School of Sculpture and Architecture. He was expelled for his poor academic record and indiscipline. He then enrolled at the art secondary school in Penza.
In 1910, he finished school, which gave him a “drawing qualification”. In 1911, he set up a workshop for collective creation in the company of friends. Tatlin was immediately accepted as their leader. He named the collective the Material Culture Group.
After a short period of study, he painted himself completely (like Marcel Duchamp) between 1910-13. He embraced post-impressionism. The subjects of his paintings are related to his own life.
Between 1913-14 he painted a few more pictures, sporadic works that emerged in the relief period.
From 1914 onwards, he was mainly interested in relief and set design. During his lifetime, Tatlin made sets for five Russian-themed performances, and almost without exception they were important links in his artistic career.
Image reliefs, counter reliefsIn his next period, he will be greatly influenced by the staturation of icons. Tatlin seems to have been attracted by the generalised visual language of old Russian icon painting. He was extremely interested in the patchiness of form, its contours and the relationship between the separate ”patches”. In 1913 he published the slogan: “Let us bring the eye under the control of touch”. In this context, he became interested in ”unpaintable” materials (in the words of Velemir Khlebnikov, he created ”tin objects with his brush”) and stepped out of the plane of the image into real space. In 1913 he spent short periods in Berlin and Paris. For him, Picasso”s art was the most important and lasting experience of his entire trip abroad. The works of Pablo Picasso were an important inspiration for Tatlin”s further work, but he did not become an epigone of the French artist. Tatlin believed that in 1914 he had made ”material, space and construction” the basis of all ”plastic art”, and he attributed to this fact a fundamental importance for the development of art.
At the beginning of the 1910s, the expressive deformation of real form in avant-garde art shifted towards extreme generalisation, and representation was replaced by a non-figurative language of “signs” and “formulas”. This is how the various systems of abstract painting came into being. Tatlin was very interested in analysing the construction and tectonics of the material world. In doing so, he made a fundamental artistic discovery: he moved non-figurative forms of different colours and textures out of the plane of the picture into the space in front of it, without initially separating them from the plane surface. In this way, the depicted spatial relations of the elements of the picture were replaced by the real relations of the elements in real space. The reliefs in the picture were a new synthesis of painting and sculptural methods. Tatlin called this type of work ”combinations of materials”, since the abstract image that became a pictorial relief was no longer painted but composed of materials with different structural and painterly properties.
The next step was to break away from the plane of the image: the composition was placed in real space, in front of the background plane or between two planes at right angles to each other, and rested on a flexible wire or a bent rigid axis. It was the first ”pedestal-less sculpture” that also had ”architectural” features. As we have already seen, the question of the end of painting was raised in many places during this period. Painting is often combined with sculpture. Hans Arp, Alexander Archipenko, Tatlin, all of them were experimenting in this way. After the reliefs came the counter reliefs (“higher combinations”). Contra relief steps out of the painterly plane. Tatlin”s name, counter-relief, perhaps refers to the musical word contra, which means 1 octave lower, so that the work is endowed with a notion of deeper materiality. Tatlin explores the relationship between substance and tension. In the corner reliefs, the problem of ”tension” comes to the fore. Unfortunately, most of these works have been destroyed. We distinguish between two types of counter-relief:
Central relief: the relief is made up of wires and wires and projects in front of the plane. The background is a flat surface.
Corner relief: they are placed in a corner, like the sacred images in Russia, and are free and bold. In Tatlin”s work, the formations are not intended to depict but to express the original quality of the objects. He worked with the limestone he found in his cellar. Tatlin saw his method as a synthesis of painting, sculpture and architecture.
He considered the material to be the determining factor, and therefore paid particular attention to the selection of materials appropriate to the task and to the design of the space and structural form according to the properties of the selected materials. This required a change in the traditional artistic method. Tatlin radically broke with representation in works of this kind, and did so for reasons of principle. The function of the wire, the twine or the cord was not representational but structural. In Tatlin, the meaning of the materials is important in itself. They are abstract works that convey the artist”s subject, they have no direct use. They are subjective models of the surrounding world, and this is a contradiction between constructive essence and functional uselessness. For all these reasons, the encounter between artist and audience seemed theoretically problematic and practically almost impossible. Art that sought to be the art of the age, as opposed to the art of the past, was rejected by storm. Thus, one of the most difficult problems of the new art became its own social role in the feedback between the spectator and the work of art. Tatlin”s works constituted a peculiar “accumulation fund” that had no immediate practical purpose, and yet remained a reserve for the future. It will have an impact on architecture and industrial design. The path from ”studio architecture” to architecture and industrial design will be Tatlin”s own.
In 1917, after the overthrow of Tsarism, the scale and nature of Tatlin”s activities changed suddenly. Tatlin joined the ”left-wing bloc” of the newly created Union of Art Workers, which sent him to Moscow to help organise the new artistic life. He joined several committees to work intensively. He was involved in editing programme documentation, organising planning, distributing and taking commissions, decorating cities for the festive season, nationalising several museums, organising workshops, etc.
Russian Constructivism will split in two, the two parts will be enemies of each other. Tatlin is accused of foolish machismo. “Production was ignorant of artistic culture. Art culture hovered above production and practical life. It is time to bring artistic culture into production, to free art from the caste-like confinement of purposeless snobbery, that is, to create the art of production.” – says Tatlin. This will henceforth be the basic premise of his conceptual architecture. During this period, his main focus is on teaching. He wants to eliminate the distinction between high art and the ordinary. In his architecture he creates a pattern that is in principle a building, but in practice an anti-building. In this period, architecture is considered by many to be the main art, because it absorbs all the other disciplines. Tatlin wants to develop a new architectural form.
The model of the building was completed by August 1920. The primary problem in its construction was that it was to be a mobile building. Between the two spirals would have rotated a cube, a cone, a cylinder and a hemisphere (dome). Its gigantic size (400 metres) was not feasible at the time. The projected edge of the cube was 110 metres. Tatlin also planned air conditioning for the interior. The building was in contact with the whole globe so that its inclination was the same as the Earth”s axis, and its motion was the Earth”s motion, its rotation. The cube would turn in a year, the cone in a month, the cylinder in a week, the hemisphere in a day. The height of the tower, 400 metres, is no coincidence: it is equal to one hundred thousandth of the circumference of the Earth”s meridian. A lattice structure linking the spiral threads held together the elements of the spatial construction, which was considered to be a unified whole. Its spirals formed an unusual spatial form, but were not decorative, but served as a huge supporting structure. The use of suspended structures allowed the load-bearing frame to be relieved and suspended walls to be used as partitions, i.e. without the need to clutter up the usable interior spaces of the suspended forms with buttresses. The Tatlin Tower also continued the tradition of old Russian art, which sought to give a distinctive form to the buildings that dominated the cityscape and thus the city itself. The monument to the Third International would have dominated any cityscape. Tatlin, precisely because of its strong manifesto character, wanted to build it outside the city centre, not in it, and did not want to link the design to a specific urban environment. In its construction he aimed for an unearthly space. It defies gravity, the tower already exists in a spiritual space. It is a new Tower of Babel, in contrast to the biblical Tower of Babel. Instead of human arrogance and desire to rise, it holds together and unites humanity, who are united by their effort. This design was created on a small model, made of wood, wire and cardboard. Its height is 5 metres. The model is, as is usual, simplified in many aspects of construction compared to the blueprints. The individual parts were made as accurately as possible, but it is also striking that all the work was done by hand, with no machine work. These two conditions made the method of model construction similar to sculptural work and the model itself to abstract sculpture, giving the model and some of its parts a vivid plastic effect that is quite unusual for metal sculpture. It also had a great influence on painting, which in the early 20th century was forced by the questions and answers it posed to step out into space, and thus into architecture. With this energetic spiral, Tatlin wanted to show the will and ability of man to break free from the traditions and routines of the past and to subdue the forces of nature. This monument expresses the idea that we cannot change the world without knowing the most fundamental laws of structure and mathematics and putting them at the service of the future of human society.
The plan for the monument to the Third International was followed by the idea of a monument to Lenin. Both evoked a type of huge community building with multiple functions, but not memorials in the traditional sense of the word (e.g. the function of museum, library, etc. was excluded in principle), the new type of building was intended to provide a place for the most active processes of modern life. In addition to their communal functions, these buildings were also intended to meet the needs of the individual, both spiritual – mainly through the highly developed information network – and biological – through the construction of restaurants, gyms, etc.
The first Dada exhibition in Berlin featured Tatlin. El Liszickij painted him with a computer brain, but as we have seen Tatlin was fortunately not like that.
Industrial design in Tatlin was increasingly relegated to the background. He then turned to theatre and applied arts. He uses natural creative methods. He was constantly searching for organic forms that were both new and suited to traditional natural materials. He designs chairs, coffee grinders, clothes, etc. He uses natural materials in his designs. These things are not based on a technical principle, but on the direct experience of the material. This principle of the primacy of matter was not only present in the visual arts at this time, but also in structuralist literature. He uses systems of natural forms and organisms. He is also interested in natural phenomena and laws, which he wants to incorporate into the visual arts. All the designed objects that Tatlin created had a very intimate relationship with man, mostly serving man”s individual needs. Objects are tools for a man for whom the spiritual life is more important than the material world. These objects are devoid of all luxury, adornment, self-indulgence and prestige. One cannot become addicted to such objects. Tatlin humanised objects of use in the same way that he sought to humanise technology through art.
It is a demonstrative and romantic idea of this structure. The name Letatlin is derived from the Russian word “Летающий Татлин” (in Hungarian it would sound like “letajuscsij Tatlin”), which translates into Hungarian as “Flying Tatlin”. This name was first mentioned by Velemir Hlebnyikov. The design was based on Leonardo”s designs. The point of the machine is not whether it can fly, but the concept and consistent execution of the operation. Thus, this work can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art. The airframe is a classic example of how Tatlin applied the ”bionic” method to design. He made a conscious effort to both explore and use the laws of nature in the process of creation and to create a feedback loop between the designer”s object and the natural environment. Many have concluded from Tatlin”s art that it has “retreated into technique”. But Tatlin was only reminding us that he is a near-universal artist and can continue his work in any art form. When the productivists were deprived of the realistic ground of their activity, he had to ”return” to a traditional field of art labelled ”non-formalist”. Tatlin chose painting, architecture and theatre as his options. And indeed, in the years between 1930 and 1950, he was mostly engaged in painting and graphic art, but almost entirely ”for himself”. His main field of activity was the theatre. Here he was able to preserve his principles, although at times he was forced to move away from the material form and make concessions to the distorted principle of ”realism”.
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