This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Constructivism began as a material experiment before it became a political program. In 1913, the Russian painter Vladimir Tatlin traveled to Paris, where he saw the Cubist relief constructions Pablo Picasso had begun assembling from wood, sheet metal and other found materials. Returning to Russia, Tatlin abandoned painting for a new kind of object he called a counter-relief, an abstract construction of real industrial materials, iron, glass, wood and wire, arranged in space rather than depicted in illusionistic paint. He showed these corner counter-reliefs, suspended across the corners of a room rather than hung flat on a wall, in 1915, and the sculptor and photographer Alexander Rodchenko soon developed a parallel practice of severe, ruler and compass abstract drawings. The Russian Revolution of 1917 gave these formal experiments a new, explicitly political purpose. Constructivists, working within new Soviet cultural institutions, argued that art should serve the revolution directly, not by illustrating it but by applying artistic skill to the design of everyday objects, textiles, buildings and propaganda. Tatlin's most famous work, the Monument to the Third International, commissioned in 1919, embodied this ambition at its most extreme. Exhibited as a 22 foot model in December 1920 at the Eighth Congress of the Soviets, the design proposed a leaning spiral iron tower far taller than the Eiffel Tower, intended to house a glass cylinder, cone and cube, each rotating at a different speed and used for government meetings, propaganda broadcasts and even a projector that would write news across the clouds. Though never built beyond its model, Tatlin's Tower became the defining image of Constructivist ambition, a fusion of sculpture, architecture and engineering meant to give physical form to revolutionary society itself, and it remains the work most often cited as the true beginning of Constructivism as a movement rather than an individual artist's experiment.