Word: tatlin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...collapsed soon enough; today it looks like a fossil from the early Messianic era of modernism. In fact, none of the more exalted claims made for abstract art over the past century have worn well. In the first flush of optimism after the 1917 Revolution, artists like Vladimir Tatlin hoped that abstraction, if made of the common materials used by workers, could lift dialectical materialism to a new plane and so become the basis of a popular art. These dreams ended in indifference and, for some, the Gulag...
...workers' materials like tin and rope and painted wood; the disembodied black and red squares of now cracking paint. French gallerygoers 100 years ago never felt like this about the art of the French Revolution. Jacques-Louis David looked old-fashioned by then, whereas Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova and all their colleagues in the ism soup of the Russian artistic vanguard still look fresh and daring...
Then there is the international preoccupation with a benign Utopia -- Europe's reaction against the horror of war -- whose "spiritual" symbol was glass architecture. Besides the familiar Constructivist icons, such as the sculptor Vladimir Tatlin's wooden model for a giant tower that was to commemorate the Third Communist International, there are fantasies by much- lesser-known artists -- the outstanding one being a German, Wenzel Hablik, whose radiant glass towers and many-colored domes resemble designs for the New Jerusalem...