Conscience of an Art : A Seattle show offers a revealing look at Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian avant-garde of an earlier era

Because they are so rare, exhibitions of the extraordinary art of the early 20th-Century Russian avant-garde are always greeted with keen anticipation. And in light of the international events of the past year, normal expectation is further heightened.

“Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914-1932” turns out to be among the most revealing exhibitions to have been mounted anywhere in the United States in quite some time. For within the larger parameters of this generally illuminating show, penetrating new light has been shed on the art of Vladimir Tatlin, an enigmatic and compelling figure who is central to the Constructivist enterprise.

Curators Richard Andrews, who is director of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, where the show may be seen through Sept. 2, and Milena Kalinovska, who works independently, have marshalled a talented and extensive team of associates and international advisers to manage this exceptional feat. The Henry Art Gallery is not large, but the ambition of the presentation most certainly is.

The show is the first large-scale exhibition to focus solely on Russian Constructivist art. This fact alone makes it notable. The galleries are literally stuffed with paintings, architectural models, graphics, agitprop posters, visionary machines, textiles, designs and models for theater sets and costumes. (Remarkably, some 80% of the more than 300 works are Soviet-owned, and many have never before been seen in the West.) Sorting through an immensely complicated and argumentative history, one whose difficulty has long been exacerbated by the inaccessibility of much Russian avant-garde art, the curators have assembled a show of surprising equanimity.

Tatlin, of course, is the pivotal figure in the development of Constructivism. From start to finish, the artist hovers about the show. Its very title, “Art Into Life,” comes from a programmatic statement long attributed to the artist, a youthful merchant seaman and son of a railroad engineer.

Indeed, a good part of the explanation for the refreshing clarity of the presentation can be traced to its cogent understanding of the problematic relationship between Constructivism, as a genre, and Tatlin, as an individual artist. (Not surprisingly, Tatlin’s work was also much in evidence during a recent two-day symposium at the university, held in conjunction with the exhibition.) The artist was, in an important way, Constructivism’s conscience.

In the galleries, one of Tatlin’s radical 1914 constructions of painted steel, wood and glass, suspended in space in a corner of the room by stabilizing rods, appears early on. (More precisely, on display is a clever reconstruction of one of those long-lost reliefs, which are believed to be the first nonobjective sculptures made. None has survived.) Pointedly, this radical relief is the first thing you see after a dazzling introductory room devoted to “The End of Painting.” It features startling canvases and panels by Lyubov’ Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Aleksandr Vesnin and others.

Next, the main body of the exhibition is introduced by a large photographic mural of Tatlin’s landmark proposal for the “Monument to the Third International.” (Three versions of the model were made, all of them also lost, making Tatlin’s tower-monument one of the most widely admired works of art that nobody has ever seen.) A brilliantly evocative synthesis of sculpture, architecture and engineering, the tower appropriately precedes rooms divided into sections on the utilitarian role of Constructivist artists in the production of goods: revolutionary posters and propaganda kiosks, utilitarian objects for the home, a reconstruction of Rodchenko’s 1925 design for the Workers’ Club reading room, the theater, architecture and, finally, visionary design.

This last, too, is dominated by Tatlin--specifically, by his so-called “air bicycle,” a one-person flying-machine dubbed “Letatlin” (1929-31), that never quite got off the ground. This remarkable, birdlike construction, which owes clear debts to the experimental studies of Leonardo Da Vinci, has never before been shown in this country. Meant to revolutionize individual mobility, the glider was finally displayed at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum in 1932--the same year Joseph Stalin’s Communist Party Decree on the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations finally silenced the avant-garde, Tatlin included, once and for all.

In fact, the elegant contraption in the show was assembled in the 1960s from remnants of the three versions of “Letatlin” made by the artist. There is certain irony to be found here. At precisely the three moments in the Henry Art Gallery exhibition in which Vladimir Tatlin’s decisive role is asserted, the artist is necessarily represented by a reconstruction, a documentary photograph and a makeshift hybrid.

The general vagaries of time, coupled with the specifically brutal Stalinist repression of the 1930s, are of course to blame for the eradication of so much primary art of the Russian avant-garde. Yet, even from remnants and copies, Tatlin’s powerful significance comes through. The reason, I think, is that, as an artist, Tatlin knew and trusted the incomparable authority that resides in the powerful artistic image. He wasn’t simply making handsome utilitarian objects.

Constructivism didn’t always do that, often ceding commitment instead to goals of industrial fabrication and mass production. Constructivism has been notoriously difficult to define because, from the start, it was less an aesthetic program than a monumental question.

Russia, it must be remembered, was not a modern industrialized nation at the time of the revolution. It was a feudal, agrarian state. Constructivism asked how art, which is embedded in an artisanal tradition of handmade objects, could proceed in any productive way in a revolutionary world enchanted by the modern promise of industrial technology, and possessed of utopian aspirations.

Tatlin showed a way. Take those 1914-15 “counter-reliefs,” begun when he was 29. What Tatlin achieved in his pre-revolutionary counter-reliefs was nothing less than the creation of an utterly modern Russian icon. In the years surrounding the revolution, traditional forms of painting and sculpture were increasingly claimed to be obsolete, the decadent expression of individualist bourgeois culture. The end of painting--so beautifully encapsulated by Rodchenko’s devastating triptych, consisting of three monochromatic canvases each in a primary hue--would finally parallel the end of the bourgeois class. But what next?

Tatlin’s answer was to proceed intuitively, in an effort to make painting and sculpture thoroughly modern. Employing such new artistic materials as metal, wire and wood, his painted constructions built on the precedent of Picasso’s Cubist reliefs, which he had seen on a trip to Paris but put to wholly different ends. Picasso’s reliefs retained visual ties to still-life objects; Tatlin’s were wholly non-figurative, exploring properties of form, material and space instead.

The relationship between Tatlin’s counter-reliefs and the religious tradition of Russian icon painting has long been noted. His reliefs projected outward, into the real space of a room, echoing the peculiar, inverted perspective depicted in Russian icons. Suspended in the corner, they also recalled the traditional placement of religious paintings in Russian homes. And Tatlin’s concept of faktura , or the integrity of a physical material’s expressive potential, was meant to create artistic forms of universal significance.

As the revolution would transform society, so revolutionary art would attempt to transform the material world. In the dramatic social upheaval during and after the tumultuous civil war of 1917, Russian society, as it had always been known, was wholly displaced. Soon, Tatlin’s prewar idea of creating a modern Russian icon made little sense. For me, the exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery offers convincing evidence that, in his post-revolutionary “Monument to the Third International,” what the artist found was a way to make an utterly modern Soviet icon.

The spiraling tower is a bizarre, wondrous, inventive, wildly impossible thing. Tatlin’s plan was to build a construction of iron, far taller than the Empire State Building, and tilted parallel to the axis of the Earth. The swirling building, whose skeletal design upped the ante of the Eiffel Tower to an hallucinatory degree, would house four glass enclosures--a cube, cylinder, pyramid and hemisphere--which would revolve at different speeds. These crystalline buildings would function as communal conference centers, legislative offices and government propaganda centers. Finally, the great tower would stand in the center of Moscow, heart of the communal Soviet state.

Needless to say, such an amazing building could not possibly have been constructed. The technology wasn’t remotely available, especially in a largely impoverished, agrarian society where even rudimentary industry was a far-off dream.

But neither was Vladimir Tatlin a fool. There can be no doubt he knew full well that such a building was impossible to construct. It didn’t matter. As an artist, he had other things on his mind.

Vestiges of the religious meaning of traditional Russian icons will be found in Tatlin’s choice of a soaring spiral path of iron and glass for his futuristic building. The 1920 model, which was pulled through the streets of Moscow before jubilant throngs, plainly recalls the biblical Tower of Babel, in which Noah’s descendants tried to construct a tower reaching all the way to heaven. Tatlin’s design captured the popular imagination as a shining symbol for the dream of revolutionary culture, fueled by utopian and visionary aspirations. Clearly, it was as a devotional symbol--as an icon representing the Soviet ideal--that the monumental construction was intended to function.

Today as then, Tatlin’s tower was a thumping success. The fact that the models no longer exist adds poignance to the sight of “Letatlin,” the graceful flying-machine reassembled from fragments of the artist’s three original experiments. Tatlin worked on models of this human-powered “air bicycle” for several years, from 1929 to 1931, after a stint designing clothing, dishware, stoves, infant nursing vessels and other items the state hoped to put into mass production. Given the hard industrial goals of these earlier projects, the exquisitely handcrafted “Letatlin” comes as something of a shock.

Although “Letatlin” incorporates such industrial materials as steel cable and duraluminum, it is principally fashioned from a tensile skeleton of curved and joined wood, over which a skin of cloth is stretched. Recalling as they do the billowing sails and wooden masts of an ocean vessel, these materials hark back to Tatlin’s youthful days as a merchant seaman. Ironically, wooden stretchers and cloth also recall the structural materials of painting, the bourgeois medium overthrown by Tatlin’s Constructivist program. It’s as if the artist, poised on the brink of the revolution’s collapse at the rise of Joseph Stalin, had returned to the source to find a means for earthly liberation.

Art was that source. Tatlin showed that, in revolutionary culture, painting may have come to an end. Art, on the other hand, had a vibrant reason for being.