A young Vladimir Tatlin was often seated near the Dnipro river in Kyiv and looked at the birds. It was there that he found a stork with an injured wing. It is perhaps during the creation of his avian bones that he came to the idea of ”Letatlin” (1930-1932), a flying machine with human power with bird-shaped wings, an optimistic vision of human harmonization with nature and industry. A version of this emblematic glider, its wings that stop in the soft bulbs of pussy willows, hover over a recreation from the artist's studio Tatlin: Kyiv at the Ukrainian museum. The artist's first exhibition in North America extends over his two -year -old period little known in kyiv, highlighting his influence as a teacher, elucidating his constructivist ideals, and recovering the heritage of one of the most important cultural personalities of Ukraine as the moving country the existential threat of the war of Russia.
Vladimir Tatlin – “Ukrainian: Volodymr”, underlines the press release – was born in 1885 in Kharkiv, now Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. (His birthplace is sometimes listed like Moscow, where Many of his works take place.) His father was a mechanical engineer and his mother was a poet and revolutionary, and that shows: his work synthesizes their technical prowess, their inclination towards beauty and political conviction. From 1925 to 1997, he taught at the kyiv Art Institute, where he founded and produced his theater, cinema and photography department. During this period, it was settled and costume for two pieces, and the All-Ukrainian Jubilee exhibition presented sketches and models for the cinema and the theater made by its assistant and its students.
This is what the chronology at the start of the program tells us, leaving aside any other detail at his death in Moscow in 1953. Tatlin was the father of constructivism, an austere artistic movement which emphasized the societal objective of art – community on individuality, aesthetics merged with industry. Geometric abstraction, industrial materials and daring colors and graphics have defined its aesthetics. Although it was initially adopted in the newly formed Soviet Union, the Soviets came to believe that abstraction could not achieve their objectives, and socialist realism appeared. In 1928, the government tightened its understanding of art and shortly after, it suddenly suppressed Ukrainian culture: dismiss or assassinate cultural personalities, destroy art and archives, prohibiting the statement of certain names. Tatlin moved to Moscow, where he exhibited once, in 1932. “After that”, Oksana Semenik wrote in her excellent catalog test accompanying the show, “The artist would disappear until his death.” He died in his studio, forgotten. Almost everything that was thrown there. A single known photo exists from the artist to Kyiv.
It is a difficult archive from which to make an exhibition. But he exercises these gaps with power. Tatlin: Kyiv is haunted by what could have been, if the story had shaken differently – and by extension, by the urgency of this could beDepending on how we are conducting each other right now. The program opens onto a prototype of the clean and futuristic chair design of Tatlin, which seems to suspend the human silhouette with the calligraphic power of its lines. Behind that, a massive and grainy photograph of a previous prototype. Why share the plan when the product is there? Because the dream, such pairing suggests, is just as important.
“Monument to the third international” (1919-2020), the Tatlin plan for a structure to be erected in tribute to the new revolutionary government after the October 1917 Revolution, and the work for which it is most known, has never been built. But if he had been, he had never wanted it to be permanent; He wanted this to reflect the fleetingness of political cycles. However, it is a rare treat to be in the presence of his original works. In “Female Nude Body 1” (c. 1920), placed with its pair in front of the chair, the fingers of the figure are barely delimited by arcged lines, a vase of flowers just a mess of blows on its knees. “Female Nude Body 2” (c. 1920S) is even more intensely abstract – a choir of diagonal lines, a body collapsed.
But these original pieces, for aforementioned reasons, are by far in numerical inferiority by copies, leisure, photographs and the work of others. Housed in the windows are a set of its conceptions for the magazine Harm (1925-1933). These are surprising – a Zags illustration in a V -shaped form on a complete propagation – and made me wish more than more traditional contemporary magazines were as experimental. A particular culmination is his “collage for the film” The Diplomatic Pouch “by Oleksandr Dovzhenko” (1927), in which space, depth and representation mix with playful and evocative in each other – train tracks, a pipe, the door frame, the horizon line, an aerial view of a city, the holder hen. But some of them seem to be printing photographs, the originals lost in history or housed in inhospitable collections. Other “works” in the show include a reproduction of a photo in which Tatlin rocks a BanduraA Ukrainian music instrument; a photograph of the building that housed his apartment and studio; and a photograph of his students.
Tatlin's influence could be clearer in the work of his students at the kyiv Art Institute, where he joined art in industry and daily life, promoting collaboration through group projects and challenging them to think deeply about the goal of their practices. “This is a large -scale organization,” confirmed a Belgian journalist in a school profile, according to the catalog test of Tetyana Filevska. The “drawing. Drawing “by Mykola Triaskin (not dated) emphasizes the communion of humans and machinics, with particular attention dedicated to the truncated cone of a fishing net with increasing diagonals, the umbrella a fusion of line and arcs segments. A particular star is “the poster for the film of sperm mandel Take -off By Dimitrii DEBABOV “(1931), in which the word to” ride “(” Валццовка “) is stated on a red arrow pointing with a large pill -shaped bar labeled” iron “(железа) to the worker involved in the process, marrying the signifiers and sketches of crisp, dynamic and elegant. Costumes for the Ballet of Cesare Pugni Esmeralda (not dated) are colored and sometimes fun: one of them remembers a silver tentacre and the open-nut-necal opener ventilated from the left thigh to form the neckline. All the figures represented have the abstract clarity of a playing card.
Peter Doroshenko – who is also a curator of this show, director of the museum and commissioner of multiple editions of the Ukrainian pavilion at the Biennale de Venice – deserves the credit of his exhibition design here. He shapes Tatlin: Kyiv To reflect the artist's ideals, so that they shine. The windows cut powerful diagonals which seem to reflect the dynamic line of its drawings. The surfaces are painted in constructivist colors: bright red, fatty blue, lime green. A narrowed black matt platform that entails us towards a most tatlineque photocollage of the artist's portrait, an image of the “Letatlin” and a river printed on the wall.
But Doroshenko Magnum opus is a recreation from the artist's studio, where he takes the most liberties. He is based on a memory written by Hanna Behicheva, one of the students and colleagues of Tatlin: “It was here, in this room,” she wrote, “where people fell from Tatlin as if he were crazy, that the idea of” Letatlin “criticized”. Doroshenko summons this presence by projecting a video of the stork on the bed. Letatlin hovers spectrally above the head while bird songs fill the space. I feel like I was transported to Tatlin's head space while his dream comes to life.
Any exposure of this type has a prospect to promote. Filevska's declaration that “the kyiv Art Institute had the most ambitious and effective leadership”, for example, could carry a touch of nationalist overexagation. But what is indisputable is that Tatlin was a great artist whose capacity was limited by a cruel regime. And that this happens, right now, in Ukraine. But as Tatlin proves it in this powerful retrospective, even the ghost of a dream is a difficult thing to destroy.
Tatlin: Kyiv Continue to the Ukrainian museum (222 East 6th Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) until April 27. The exhibition was organized by Peter Doroshenko.
