The Brooklyn Rail

Most biographical accounts of the artist Vladimir (Ukrainian: Volodymyr) Tatlin lists him as teaching between 1927 and 1930 at VKhUTEMAS, the cradle of Russian Constructivism in Moscow, which schooled an entire generation of modernists in everything from photography to textiles to set design. Often glossed over, by contrast, are the years immediately preceding this instruction, when the artist taught at Kyiv’s Art Institute from 1925 to 1927. Like that of Kazimir Malevich, another pillar of Soviet modernism, Tatlin’s association with Moscow remains inveterate in art historical accounts. Both artists were, however, born in present-day Ukraine (Malevich in Kyiv, Tatlin in Kharkiv, in 1885). Seeking to “decolonize” Ukrainian art history, this small, evocative exhibition sheds welcome light on Tatlin’s Ukrainian heritage and vital connection to Kyiv’s cultural history, illuminating an understudied dimension of his practice and pedagogy alike. Alongside images by fellow Kyiv Constructivists and apprentices, reconstructions of a few lost works by Tatlin flesh out this vital but little-known period in his prodigious career.

Like Malevich, Tatlin is rightly celebrated in art history as both an aesthetic pioneer and an immensely influential teacher. The consequence of his instruction at VKhUTEMAS remains gospel. Far less familiar is his founding of the Kyiv Art Institute’s theater, film, and photography department. The very establishment of such a faculty attests to a seismic shift in aesthetic education by the 1920s. In step with the drive toward industrialization and modernization, the post-revolutionary Soviet Union reconfigured curricular imperatives—and, just as often, repackaged their physical and institutional appearance. (Kyiv’s art school occupied what had previously been the city’s Theological Seminary.) As Stalin tightened his grip on Party leadership, the Constructivism of artists like Tatlin became subordinated to the dictates of Socialist Realism by the mid-1930s. The experiments in photomontage and typography evidenced in the Ukrainian journal Kino—several examples of which appear on display here—reveal the innovation and range of such experiments on the eve of their marginalization.

Tatlin had proven instrumental in bringing to Russia the very benchmarks of modernist innovation, namely the experiments undertaken in Paris on the eve of World War One. His trip to Paris in 1913—during which he visited Picasso’s studio and offered (unsuccessfully) to work as the Spaniard’s studio assistant—saw him thoroughly assimilate Cubist strategies. Angular geometric faceting entered Tatlin’s pictorial vocabulary as quickly and thoroughly as it did that of Malevich, Liubov Popova, and various other painters. Yet from Cubist collage and sculpture Tatlin also drew lessons central to the Constructivist imagination, blurring the boundaries between aesthetics and objecthood, contemplation and utility. The exhibition opens with a pair of ink and pencil drawings from the late 1920s, revealing Tatlin’s enduring debts to Cubism. If one of these nude women depicted retains some abidingly academic features, the other reveals a face entirely replaced with a jagged, lopsided shard.

The tendency finds more emphatic—and concrete—manifestation in a tribune stand that Tatlin made for the Kyiv Art Institute’s assembly hall, specially reconstructed for this exhibition. Documented in congress photographs but long since disappeared, the stand was originally wrought from wooden blocks stacked asymmetrically. Though not as adventurous as El Lissitzky’s planned Lenin Tribune made between 1920 and 1924 (imagined to thrust diagonally and swivel), Tatlin’s stand likewise adapted Cubist and Futurist geometries in defying stolid proportionality and—just as importantly—evoked Marxist revolution in decidedly Marxist terms.

Less explicitly ideological, though equally utilitarian, is the wood and leather chair that Tatlin designed while in Kyiv, which has been produced and distributed by Nikol International (now in tubular steel) since the 1950s. Indeed, despite Constructivism’s industrial bent, wood proved a frequent material for Tatlin and others since it was cheaper and more readily available.

So too did other substances, as the exhibition highlights in an elegiac homage to one of the artist’s most striking experiments: Letatlin. As a play on his last name and the Russian verb “to fly” (letat), this planned flying machine dates to his time in Kyiv, where he devised early prototypes out of willow branches found during his walks along the river. Comparable to some of Leonardo Da Vinci’s designs, Letatlin evinced the widespread interest in flight as a consummately modern phenomenon. A rough-hewn reconstruction gives a good sense of how the more sophisticated prototype might have started out. (The exhibition argues for Tatlin as one of the founders of twentieth-century conceptual art, though this begs the question: why, then, might we want to recreate his physical objects?) Unlike so many of the other museum reconstructions of Letatlin, however, this version conjures up its organic origins: consonant with the artist’s keeping of a pet stork and frogs in his Kyiv studio, evoked here through recorded amphibian croaks and the projected image of the bird on a white bed, along with some stray willow branches. The installation calls to mind less the technological asceticism of Constructivism than the poetics of Sergei Parajanov’s lyrical cinema.

The latter derives, however, from the same Ukrainian genealogy, attested to here by various posters for Alexander Dovzhenko’s films. Though regrettably spare (especially given the galleries’ spaciousness), the exhibition does round out some of Tatlin’s works with that of his protegees. Already by 1927, the All-Ukrainian Jubilee Exhibition featured models and sketches for film and theater by a range of his students. As attested to by a photograph enlarged on the wall, that group of “Kino Photo Theater” pupils appears to have been a spirited bunch, though more exclusively male than other Constructivist rosters (of twenty-one students, only one appears to have been a woman). Also included are works by one of Tatlin’s assistants, Mykola Triaskin, and several striking costume designs by the Ukrainian composer Valentyn Borysov. Given the eventual Soviet purging of various Ukrainian archives—to say nothing of more recent depredations—these inclusions further flesh out a once thriving modernist enclave.