Exhibition of Russian avant-garde artist Tatlin in Basel Automatic translate

The Museum Tinguely Museum in Basel devotes the largest summer exhibition to the work of Russian avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953). Presented works will include early paintings, sculptural forms, reconstruction of the revolutionary tower and the Letatlin aircraft. In addition, Tatlin’s works made for the theater will be exhibited.

Vladimir Tatlin - Self Portrait. 1911. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

The work of this outstanding artist of the early twentieth century will be presented in more than one hundred masterpieces provided on loan by the largest museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The exhibition will show a wide selection of his early paintings with their bold color schemes and vivid use of dark and light shapes. In these works, Tatlin achieved a very original synthesis of Russian tradition and the French avant-garde.

By 1914, Tatlin had become a brilliant revolutionary artist: the feeling of what was about to happen in 1917 was so strong. These works, created before the October Revolution, make up his most radical contribution to contemporary art.

The exhibition also presents the reconstruction of the famous tower of Vladimir Tatlin, dedicated to the Third International. As conceived by the author, the design was supposed to reach 400 meters in height, but for various reasons - the civil war, lack of material resources and time - it was never realized. In 1920, Nikolai Punin praised design as "an international event in the world of art, an organic synthesis of the principles of architecture, sculpture and painting."

Another famous Tatlin project - the Letatlin flying machine, a wonderful synthesis of art, technology and utopia - can be considered the culmination and the final result of the study of the volume and limits of sculpture.

Anna Sidorova