CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/15/2012
Now available: the first English-language overview of the pioneering Russian artist, inventor, architect, engineer, designer and avant garde hero Vladimir Tatlin’s work in more than 25 years. Below is a selection of images from the book, followed by the closing passage of Gian Casper Bott's introductory essay, reproduced from Tatlin: New Art for a New World.
Presentation of Tatlin's "Letatlin" at a glider show in Moscow, 1933.
Spar of "Letatlin," 1929-32.
Design for a street kiosk of the NGIZ (New State Publishers), 1924.
"Streltsy," costume design for the epilogue of Mikhail Glinka's opera,
A Life for the Tsar, 1913.
"Sailor (Self-Portrait)," 1911.
Tatlin's "Corner Counter-Relief," 1914-15.
"Counter-Relief (Material Combination)," 1914.
Tatlin and his assistants Joseph Meyerson and Tevel Shapiro working on the model for the "Monument to the Third International" Petrograd, 1920.
"The more closely Tatlin is studied the more incomprehensible he seems to become. His oeuvre, which was always change-directed and never failed to take into account the overall social context, is still intriguing today because it has now been almost one hundred years since he laid the foundations for tendencies that continue to be relevant, powerfully inspirational, and very much alive in contemporary art.
Fearless when it came to unfamiliar subjects, Tatlin, who liked working in a collective, was a master of interdisciplinarity and synthesis, in the brining together of things and materials, forms of presentation and aspects of aesthetic effectiveness that prior to his time did not belong together per se or a priori. With his set and costume designs Tatlin brought theater into the exhibition halls, and with his Tower model he turned architecture into an exhibition object.
'The new world is already standing at the door,' the poet Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) wrote: '…we have experienced what others live through in a hundred years; nor has it been without meaning that we have seen the new century scattering its seeds upon the earth in the thunder and lightning of terrestrial and subterranean elements; in the flashes of this lightning all the centuries appeared before us and they made us wise with belated wisdom.'" - Gian Casper Bott
