TIME AND PLACE

“Tatlin: Kyiv” explores a Russian Constructivist’s Ukrainian identity.

- BY JACKSON ARN

It may be a lazy critic cliché to write that an artist’s life was itself a work of art, but we are dealing with a man who let a wounded stork convalesce in his bed while he slept on the floor. As a teen-ager, he became a sailor and voyaged from the south of Russia to India and Egypt. Later, he made extra rubles boxing at the circus. He talked his way into Picasso’s studio by pretending to be a blind musician. Picasso kicked him out, but the same trick fooled Kaiser Wilhelm II into giving him a gold watch, which he promptly sold. His motto was “Life into art,” but only a fraction of each—just enough to fill a K.G.B. file—forms our view of Tatlin.

We can imagine how that file read, how the life was snipped, pressed, and dried: Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin.

Born 1885, a subject of the old Russian Empire. Grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Self-described artist-engineer. Enrolled in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, 1902. Proud supporter of the Revolution. Enemy of dainty bourgeois painting. Archrival of the abstract painter Kazimir Malevich. Father of Constructivism, a term that Malevich sneeringly invented and Tatlin cheekily accepted. Proponent of “real material in real space.” Sculptor of whizzing shards of metal, wire, wood, and glass. Saw no inherent contradiction between beauty and use. Spent the early years of the Soviet Union in Moscow and Petrograd, where he favored his comrades with utilitarian designs for clothes, textiles, and a super-efficient stove. Famous for his “Monument to the Third International,” an enormous skeletal wedding cake that was never built but survives thanks to models and photographs. Star of the avant-garde while the U.S.S.R. still permitted one. Later shunned for the crime of not being a painter of socialist realism. Died 1953, Moscow.