Vladimir Tatlin
(b Kharkiv, 12 Dec 1885; d Novodevichy, Moscow, 31 May
1953).
Ukrainian painter, designer, sculptor and teacher, active mainly in
Russia.The son of a railway engineer and a poet, he attended school in
Kharkiv and trained as a merchant sea cadet, visiting Bulgaria, Turkey,
Egypt, Asia Minor, Africa, Greece and Italy. He began his painting career
as an icon painter in Moscow, but he subsequently attended the Moscow
School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1902–3), studying under
Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov, before moving to the Penza School
of Art (1904–10), where his tutors were Ivan Goryushkin-Sorokopudov
(1873–1954) and Aleksey Afanas’ev (1850–1920). During the summer months he
made copies of Russian church frescoes. This awareness of traditional
painting techniques complemented the adventurous and Westernized art of
his Moscow tutors Korovin and Serov. Between 1908 and 1911 he also became
friendly with the Burlyuk brothers and Mikhail Larionov, who were
instrumental in the evolution of Russian Futurism, the iconoclastic,
absurdist, visionary development in Russian art and letters that arose
independently of Italian Futurism. Introduced to the most adventurous
exhibition groups and salons, including the World of Art and the Golden
Fleece, Tatlin learnt rapidly about recent developments in Western
European art. He also had access to the collections in Moscow of Sergey
Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, whose acquisitions of works by Monet, Gauguin,
Cézanne and the Nabis were complemented with recent paintings by Picasso
and Matisse. The newest exhibition groups seized upon recent European
developments from Paris and Munich, while simultaneously debating the
independence of Russian cultural traditions of folk art and icon painting.
Tatlin exhibited with many of the avant-garde groups, including the Jack
of Diamonds, the Union of Youth and the DONKEY’S TAIL group, which was
aggressively Russian in outlook and was inspired by non-Western,
primitivist art, folk art and icon painting. Tatlin’s works employed
compass and ruler to construct an unconventional picture space. Between
1911 and 1915 Tatlin worked in Moscow alongside the painters Aleksandr
Vesnin, Nadezhda Udal’tsova, Lyubov’ Popova, Valentina Khodasevich
(1894–1968) and Robert Fal’k, all of whom responded to the Cubist and
Futurist ideas debated and published in the journal Soyuz Molodyozhi
of the Union of Youth, with whom Tatlin was exhibiting in 1913. Tatlin was
the first illustrator, at this time, of the key Russian Futurist poets
Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh (Mirskontsa, ‘The world
backwards’; Moscow, 1912) and of the revolutionary painter-poet Vladimir
Mayakovsky (Trebnik troikh, ‘The missal of the three’, 1913). In
addition he had begun to work on stage designs, some of which he exhibited
in 1912 at an exhibition at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and
Architecture along with his paintings The Fishmonger (1911; Moscow,
Tret’yakov Gal.) and Sailor.
