Vladimir Tatlin

Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin (???????? ?????????? ??????) (December 28, 1885 (OS: December 16) – May 31, 1953) worked as a painter and architect. With Kazimir Malevich he became one of the two most important figures in the Russian Avant-Garde art movement of the 1920s.

Related Topics:
December 28 - 1885 - OS - December 16 - May 31 - 1953 - Kazimir Malevich - Russian Avant-Garde

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Tatlin was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the son of a railway engineer and a poet. He worked as a merchant sea cadet and spent some time abroad. He began his art career as an icon painter in Moscow, and attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

Related Topics:
Kharkiv - Ukraine - Moscow

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Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge "Monument to the Third International", also known as Tatlin's Tower. Planned in 1922, the monument, was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Inside an iron-and-steel structure, similar to a strip of DNA, the design envisaged three building blocks, covered with glass windows, which would rotate at different speeds (the first one, a cube, once a year; the second one, a pyramid, once a month; the third one, a cylinder, once a day). High costs prevented Tatlin from executing the plan.

Related Topics:
Tatlin's Tower - 1922 - Eiffel Tower - Paris - DNA

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Tatlin also founded Russian Constructivist Art with his counter-reliefs, structures made of wood and iron for hanging in wall corners. He conceived these "sculptures" in order to question the traditional idea of painting.

Related Topics:
Constructivist Art - Sculpture - Painting

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Although close friends at the beginning of their careers, Tatlin and Malevich diverged when Malevich did not agree with the utilitarian program of Constructivism. This led Malevich to develop his "Suprematist" program in the city of Vitebsk, where he found a school called UNOVIS (Champions of the new art). Suprematism came to light in 1915 at the 0.10 exhibition, one of the main shows of Russian avant-garde, also called "the last futurist exhibition".

Related Topics:
Suprematist - Vitebsk - UNOVIS - 1915 - Russian avant-garde

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Tatlin also dedicated himself to the study of clothes, objects and so on. At the end of his life he started to research bird-flight, in order to provide human beings with facilities that would allow them to pursue one of the great dreams of humanity: to fly. Tatlin also showed a gift for design: he prefigured some achievements even in modern marine navigation such as submarines.

Related Topics:
Design - Submarine

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Tatlin was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery, Russia.

Related Topics:
Novodevichy Cemetery - Russia

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