Vladimir Tatlin

Vladimir Tatlin was a Russian painter, sculptor and architect born December 16 (28 New Style), 1885, in Kharkov, then part of the Russian Empire, in present day Ukraine, and died May 31, 1953, in Moscow. After seeing Pablo Picasso's Cubist relief constructions in Paris in 1913, Tatlin returned to Russia and began building abstract reliefs from real industrial materials, iron, glass and wood, rather than painting or carving illusions of them, a principle that became the foundation of Constructivism. He is remembered above all for his Monument to the Third International, commissioned in 1919 and shown as a 22 foot model in December 1920, a leaning spiral iron tower meant to hold rotating glass volumes and serve as a propaganda center for the new Soviet state.