Vladimir Tatlin

Vladimir Yevgraphovich Tatlin (Russian: Влади́мир Евгра́фович Та́тлин; 28 December [O.S. 16 December] 1885 – 31 May 1953) was a Soviet painter and architect. With Kazimir Malevich he was one of the two most important figures in the Soviet avant-garde art movement of the 1920s, and he later became an important artist in the Constructivist movement. He is most famous for his design for The Monument to the Third International, more commonly known as Tatlin's Tower, which he began in 1919.

Tatlin was born in Kharkiv, 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. He also sang in Ukrainian and was a professional musician-bandurist, and performed as such abroad.

Tatlin became familiar with the work of Pablo Picasso during a trip to Paris in 1913.

Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin's Tower. Planned from 1919, the monument was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris (the Monument to the Third International was a third taller at 400 meters high). Inside the iron-and-steel structure of twin spirals, 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). For financial and practical reasons, however, the tower was never built.

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