Vladimir Tatlin

Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin (December 28, 1885 (OS: December 16) – May 31, 1953) worked as a painter and architect. 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 worked as a merchant sea cadet and spent some time abroad. 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", a tall tower all in iron, glass and steel, planned in 1922, which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris. (High costs prevented him from executing the plan.) Inside an iron-and-steel structure, similar to a strip of DNA, 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).

Tatlin also founded Russian Constructivist Art with his counter-reliefs, structures made of wood and iron for hanging in wall corners. He conceived these "sculptures" in order to question the traditional idea of painting.

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). Suprematism came to light in 1915 at the 0.10 exhibition, one of the main shows of Russian avant-garde, also called "the last futurist exhibition".

Tatlin also dedicated himself to the study of clothes, objects and so on. At the end of his life he started to research bird-flight, in order to provide human beings with facilities that would allow them to pursue one of the great dreams of humanity: to fly. Tatlin also showed a gift for design: he prefigured some achievements even in modern marine navigation such as submarines.

The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from the existing paintings.h

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