Vladimir Tatlin

Painter and designer, born in Moscow, Russia. He studied at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts, and was greatly influenced by Picasso's work in Paris in 1913. He founded Russian Constructivism, a movement at first approved by the Soviet authorities, and was commissioned to design the extraordinary spiral ironwork and rotating-glass ‘Monument to the Third International’ which, had it been built, would have been 1300 ft tall.

Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin (Владимир Евграфович Татлин) (December 28, 1885 [O.S. With Kazimir Malevich he became one of the two most important figures in the Russian avant-garde art movement of the 1920s.

Tatlin was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the son of a railway engineer and a poet. He began his art career as an icon painter in Moscow, and attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin's Tower. Planned in 1920, the monument, was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris (it was a third taller at 1,300 feet high). High costs prevented Tatlin from executing the plan.

Tatlin also founded Russian Constructivist art with his counter-reliefs — structures made of wood and iron for hanging in wall corners.

Although close friends at the beginning of their careers, Tatlin and Malevich diverged when Malevich did not agree with the utilitarian program of Constructivism. This led Malevich to develop his Suprematist program in the city of Vitebsk, where he found a school called UNOVIS (Champions of the new art).

Tatlin also dedicated himself to the study of clothes, objects and so on.

Tatlin was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow.