Word: tatlin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Tatlin's influence has long been obscured by the fact that, as a dutiful Communist, he knuckled under in the 1920s, when the Communists decided Socialist realism would be the only acceptable art form. While Gabo and Pevsner fled to the West, Tatlin ended his days in Russia as an obscure drafts man and stage designer, experimenting with Leonardo-like flying machines. (The Soviet government apparently still thinks so little of him that it refused to lend any work to the Stockholm show.) But in retrospect, argues the Modern Museum's Pontus Hulten, "Tatlin is emerging ever more...
...Tatlin's constructivist ideas were inspired by a visit to Paris, where he saw Pablo Picasso's cubist collages. He returned to startle Moscow in 1915 with an exhibit of totally abstract collages made of tin, piping and paper. "Scandal!" cried the critics. Tatlin responded by coining the word constructivism, indicating that his art was essentially creative rather than destructive. Malevich, Gabo and others thereupon declared themselves constructivists...
...years following the Revolution, the constructivists published manifestos, attained key posts in Soviet schools and workshops, and succeeded in tying their artistic ideals to the official Soviet Marxist dogma. Tatlin continued to design abstract collages, experimenting with industrial materials: zinc, cables, iron, stucco, glass and asphalt. He maintained that constructivism was the true art of the masses because it was part of the machine age. It could be mass-produced, it married impractical art to socially useful architecture, and it represented a departure from the decadent realism of the Czarist past. With mixed feeling, Berlin's Dadaist Raoul Hausmann...
...Tatlin's chef-d'oeuvre-a monument to the Third International-was a soaring behemoth of girders that was to be erected over the Neva River in Leningrad. It would have been the world's highest structure. A 22-ft.-high model was displayed in Moscow in 1920 and a new version of it in Paris in 1925. But it was never built. Engineers in Stockholm have reconstructed the model from photographs, complete with four slowly revolving inner structures shaped variously like a pyramid, a hemisphere and two cylinders. Overall, Tatlin's monument looks rather like...