Vladimir Tatlin’s Ukraine Dreaming 

A young Vladimir Tatlin often sat by the Dnipro River in Kyiv and watched the birds. It was there that he found a stork with a wounded wing. Perhaps it was while setting its avian bones that he came to the idea of the “Letatlin” (1930–32), a human-powered flying machine with bird-like wings, an optimistic vision of human attunement with nature and industry. A version of that iconic glider, its wingtips trailing off into the soft bulbs of pussy willows, hovers above a recreation of the artist’s studio in Tatlin: Kyiv at the Ukrainian Museum. The artist’s first exhibition in North America spans his little-known two-year period in Kyiv, highlighting his influence as a teacher, elucidating his Constructivist ideals, and reclaiming the legacy of one of Ukraine’s most important cultural figures as the country weathers the existential threat of Russia’s war. 

Vladimir Tatlin — “Ukrainian: Volodymr,” the press release emphasizes — was born in 1885 in Kharkiv, now Ukraine, then part of the Russian empire. (His birthplace is sometimes listed as Moscow, where many of his works are held.) His father was a mechanical engineer and his mother was a poet and revolutionary, and it shows: His work synthesizes their technical prowess, inclination toward beauty, and political conviction. From 1925 through ’27, he taught at the Kyiv Art Institute, where he founded and directed its theater, film, and photography department. During that period, he was set and costume designer for two plays, and the All-Ukrainian Jubilee Exhibition showcased sketches and models for film and theater made by his assistant and his students. 

That’s what the timeline at the beginning of the show tells us, leaving out any other details up to his death in Moscow in 1953. Tatlin was the father of Constructivism, an austere artistic movement that emphasized art’s societal purpose — collectivity over individuality, aesthetics merged with industry. Geometric abstraction, industrial materials, and bold colors and graphics defined its aesthetic. Though it was initially embraced in the newly formed Soviet Union, the Soviets came to believe that abstraction could not realize their aims, and Socialist Realism rose to the fore. By 1928, the government was tightening its grasp on art and soon after, it was brutally suppressing Ukrainian culture: firing or murdering cultural figures, destroying art and archives, banning the utterance of certain names. Tatlin moved to Moscow, where he exhibited just once, in 1932. “After this,” Oksana Semenik writes in her excellent catalog essay accompanying the show, “the artist would disappear until his death.” He died in his studio, forgotten. Nearly everything in it was thrown away. Only one known photo exists of the artist in Kyiv. 

It’s a difficult archive from which to make an exhibition. But it wields those lacunae powerfully. Tatlin: Kyiv is haunted by what could have been, if history had shaken out differently — and by extension, by the urgency of what could be, depending on how we conduct ourselves right now. The show opens with a prototype of Tatlin’s clean, futuristic chair design, which seems to suspend the human figure with the calligraphic power of its lines. Behind that looms a massive, grainy photograph of an earlier prototype. Why share the plan when the product’s right there? Because the dream, such a pairing suggests, is just as important. 

“Monument to the Third International” (1919–20), Tatlin’s plan for a structure to be erected in tribute to the new revolutionary government after the October Revolution of 1917, and the work for which he is best known, was never built. But had it been, he never intended it to be permanent; he wanted it to reflect the transience of political cycles. Still, it’s a rare treat to be in the presence of his original works. In “Female Nude Body 1” (c. 1920s), placed with its pair across from the chair, the figure’s fingers are just barely delineated by arced lines, a vase of flowers just a mess of strokes in her lap. “Female Nude Body 2” (c. 1920s) is even more intensely abstracted — a chorus of diagonal lines, a body falling apart. 

But these original pieces, for aforementioned reasons, are far outnumbered by copies, recreations, photographs, and the work of others. Housed within vitrines are a set of his designs for the magazine Kino (1925–33). These are surprising — one illustration zags in a V-shape across a full spread — and made me wish more mainstream contemporary magazines were as experimental. One particular highlight is his “Collage for the ‘The Diplomatic Pouch’ movie by Oleksandr Dovzhenko” (1927), in which space, depth, and representation playfully and evocatively blend into one another — train tracks, a pipe, the door frame, the horizon line, an aerial view of a city, the titular pouch. But some of these appear to be print-out photographs, the originals lost to history or housed in inhospitable collections. Other “works” in the show include a reproduction of a photo in which Tatlin cradles a bandura, a Ukrainian musical instrument; a photograph of the building that housed his apartment and studio; and a photograph of his students. 

Tatlin’s influence might be most clear in the work of his students at the Kyiv Art Institute, where he integrated art into industry and everyday life, fostering collaboration through group projects and challenging them to think deeply about the purpose of their practices. “This is an organism of great breadth,” a Belgian journalist confirmed in a profile of the school, according to Tetyana Filevska’s catalog essay. Mykola Triaskin’s “Drawing. Fishing” (undated) emphasizes the communion of the human and machinic, with particular attention devoted to the truncated cone of a fishing net with criss-crossing diagonals, the umbrella a fusion of line segments and arcs. One particular standout is Semen Mandel’s “Poster for the film Rolling Iron by Dimitrii Debabov” (1931), in which the word for “rolling” (“Вальцовка”) is spelled out on a red arrow pointing from a large, pill-shaped bar labeled “iron” (железа) toward the worker involved in the process, marrying the signifiers and signified in a crisp, dynamic, and elegant manner. Valentyn Borysovets’s sketches for costumes for Cesare Pugni’s ballet Esmeralda (undated) are colorful, and sometimes playful: One of them recalls a silver-and-seafoam octopus’s tentacle curled sinuously from the left thigh up to form the neckline. All of the figures depicted possess the abstracted clarity of a playing card. 

Peter Doroshenko — who is also curator of this show, director of the museum, and commissioner of multiple editions of the Ukrainan pavilion at the Venice Biennale — deserves credit for his exhibition design here. He shapes Tatlin: Kyiv to reflect the artist’s ideals, so that they shine through. Vitrines slice in powerful diagonals that seem to mirror the dynamic linework of his drawings. Surfaces are painted in constructivist colors: bright red, bold blue, lime green. A narrowing matte black platform funnels us toward a most Tatlinesque photocollage of the artist’s portrait, an image of the “Letatlin,” and a river printed on the wall. 

But Doroshenko’s magnum opus is a recreation of the artist’s studio, where he takes the most liberties. It is based on a recollection written by Hanna Behicheva, one of Tatlin’s students and colleagues: “It was right here, in this room,” she writes, “where people recoiled from Tatlin as if he were mad, that the idea of the ‘Letatlin’ crystallized.” Doroshenko summons this presence by projecting a video of the stork onto the bed. The Letatlin hovers spectrally overhead while birdsongs fill the space. It feels like you’ve been transported into Tatlin’s headspace as his dream comes alive. 

Any exhibition of this kind has a perspective to promote. Filevska’s statement that “the Kyiv Art Institute had the most ambitious and simultaneously effective leadership,” for instance, might carry a touch of nationalist overexaggeration. But what’s inarguable is that Tatlin was a great artist whose capacity was curtailed by a cruel regime. And that it’s happening again, right now, in Ukraine. But as Tatlin proves in this powerful retrospective, even the ghost of a dream is a difficult thing to destroy. 

Tatlin: Kyiv continues at the Ukrainian Museum (222 East 6th Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through April 27. The exhibition was curated by Peter Doroshenko.