Tatlin was born 28 December 1885-31 May 1953 he was a Russian and Soviet painter, architect and stage-designer. Tatlin became famous as the architect who designed The Monument to the Third International, more commonly known as Tatlin’s Tower , which he began in 1919. With Kazimir Malevich he was one of the two most important figures in the Soviet avant-garde art movement of the 1920s, and he later became an important artist in the Constructivist movement.
In 1905 he starts and in 1910 successfully completes his studies at N.Selivestrov Penza Art School in Penza. During the summer vacations he travels to Moscow and St.Petersburg to participate in various art events. In 1911 he resettled to Moscow to live by his uncle and began his art career as an icon painter.
Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin’s Tower. Planned from 1919,the monument was to be a tall tower made from iron glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris (the Monument to the Third International was a third taller at 400 meters high). Inside the iron-and-steel structure of twin spirals, 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). For financial and practical reasons, however, the tower was never built.
Tatlin was also regarded as a progenitor of Soviet post-Revolutionary Constructivist art with his pre-Revolutionary counter-reliefs, three-dimensional constructions made of wood and metal,some placed in corners (corner counter-reliefs) and others more conventionally. Tatlin conceived these sculptures in order to question the traditional ideas of art, though he did not regard himself as a Constructivist and objected to many of the movement’s ideas.
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