Curators: Polina Streltsova, Natalya Strizhkova
Architect: Yuri Avvakumov

Vladimir Tatlin is a key artist and theorist of the twentieth-century avant-garde whose ideas had a profound impact on the development of art. Alongside this, as a romantic, complex, and contradictory figure, he sincerely believed in the ideals of the revolution and in the role of the artist in building a new life. His major projects were a bold attempt to conquer the future and embodied the central principle of the avant-garde, which was the merging of art and life.

Tatlin was the first to transform utilitarian materials into artworks and created an entirely new type of object, the three-dimensional spatial counter-relief. His Monument to the Third International (Tatlin’s Tower) was never realised, although it anticipated the development of kinetic architecture and became the most recognisable image of the Soviet avant-garde. Tatlin’s ideas about space and movement, and about the harmony of form and function, laid the foundations of modern industrial design. His project for an unpowered flying machine, the Letatlin, became an artistic expression of the unity of nature, art, and technology.

Tatlin’s legacy suffered an unfortunate fate, as many of his works were lost. The surviving pieces are dispersed across museums and private collections; therefore, this forthcoming retrospective is the outcome of significant efforts to trace the artist’s principal works in all accessible collections.

For the first time in the twenty-first century, the story of Vladimir Tatlin’s creative path will be told in full, encompassing every stage from his early avant-garde experiments to his late paintings and theatre works. The exhibition architecture is structured around the many facets of Tatlin’s extraordinary personality. The exhibition will be divided into seven sections, which are The Voyager, The Singer, The Administrator, The Messenger, The Teacher, The Flyer, and The Maker. More than twenty-five museums and private collections are taking part in the project.

The exhibition will feature works that are essential for understanding the evolution of the artist’s ideas. His early paintings include the first self-portrait, Sailor (1911, State Russian Museum), and Model (1913, State Tretyakov Gallery), the manifesto painting of Tatlin’s Cubism. The sketches for the sets of Mikhail Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar (1913) and for the costumes for Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (1915–1918, Bakhrushin Museum) will also be shown. Still lifes and portraits from Tatlin’s later period include Garden Flowers (1938), Portrait of the Artist Levashova (1942), and Portrait of an Old Man (1947) from the State Russian Museum. The exhibition will also present the only surviving unpowered individual flying machine, the Letatlin (Tatlin’s Ornithopter, 1933, from the collections of the Central Museum of the Air Force, a branch of the Central Museum of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Ministry of Defence of Russia).

Reconstructions will play a significant role in the exhibition, nineteen objects in total, including several made specifically for the exhibition. These include the counter-relief with a bottle, the tableware set, and a chair that has been created in wood for the first time, as Tatlin intended. The unique reconstructions of the Monument to the Third International and the corner counter-relief, created according to the principles of scholarly reconstruction by the team of Dmitry Dimakov, the leading specialist on Tatlin’s work, have become part of the Zotov Centre collection.

The exhibition will be complemented by a sound environment created by the composer Gleb Andrianov. From one section to the next, narrated recollections of Tatlin’s colleagues and companions will illuminate the many facets of his personality. These include the artists Valentina Khodasevich, Vera Pestel, and Sofya Dymshits-Tolstaya, the art historian and theorist Nikolai Punin, the artists Viktor Elkonin and Alexander Labas, the art historian Vladimir Kostin, the pilot Konstantin Artseulov, and the theatre practitioner Anna Begicheva.

A catalogue will be published in collaboration with the State Tretyakov Gallery to mark the opening of the exhibition. This will be the first complete monograph on Vladimir Tatlin in Russian and will include both the latest research and canonical texts, among them articles by the early scholars of Tatlin and by current researchers, documents and texts by the artist with detailed commentaries, an album of two hundred works by Tatlin, and recollections of his contemporaries, many of which are being published for the first time.

A rich programme of parallel events accompanies the exhibition. As part of the educational project The Musical Dimension by musicAeterna and VTB Bank, the conductor Teodor Currentzis and members of the orchestra will select pieces of music that allow for a deeper immersion in the context of the exhibition and offer a fresh perspective on the visual arts.

The curatorial lecture series by Dmitry Krasnov, The Man Who Saw the Future, will offer six lectures and public talks devoted to the artist whose work formed a link between art, engineering, and the dream of a “new man”. The series will introduce audiences to different aspects of Tatlin’s practice, from painting and theatre sets to industrial design, architecture, and the utopias of movement.

The programme will also include a series of practical masterclasses, The Culture of Materials, inspired by the course of the same name that Tatlin taught at VKhUTEMAS.

Pictured: V. Tatlin. Model of the project for the Monument to the Third International. 1920. Reconstruction by D. Dimakov.