Tatlin's Tower was never built, yet it launched a whole art movement
Vladimir Tatlin's design for a Monument to the Third International, a spiralling machine of a building with searchlights and projection screens, ran out of money after the Russian Revolution and never rose. Its drawings still electrified Berlin and became the emblem of Constructivism, which rejected decoration for industrial materials.
Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko founded Constructivism in 1915. It grew out of Russian Futurism, especially Tatlin's counter-reliefs shown that year, and borrowed geometric abstraction from Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism. The movement was austere and abstract, set out to mirror modern industry and city life, and saw art as a tool for propaganda and social change, tying it closely to the Bolsheviks and the Russian avant-garde. Oddly, the name came from two sculptors, Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner; it first appears in Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920, and Aleksei Gan used it as a book title in 1922.
The theory was hammered out in debates at Moscow's Institute of Artistic Culture between 1920 and 1922, after the group removed its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky, for his mysticism. A working group including Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova and Rodchenko defined Constructivism as the union of faktura, an object's material qualities, and tektonika, its presence in space. Early work was three-dimensional; later the ideas spread to books and posters, where montage became central.
Tatlin's tower, designed in 1919 and 1920, split the movement. Gabo mocked it, saying artists should build either useful houses and bridges or pure art, never both. In Germany, though, George Grosz and John Heartfield posed with a placard declaring art dead and hailing Tatlin's machine art. El Lissitzky's exhibition in Berlin in 1922 and a short-lived Constructivist International, which met Dadaists and De Stijl artists, fed a lively exchange between Moscow and Berlin.
In Russia the logic ran further. Osip Brik and others pushed Productivism, demanding that artists abandon easel painting for factory work. Tatlin designed a cheap stove, workers' overalls and furniture, while tinkering until the 1930s with a flying machine he called the letatlin. The movement's reach extended to the Bauhaus and De Stijl, and to architecture, graphic and industrial design, theatre, film and fashion.
Source: Constructivism (art)
