Ten Cities that Led the World by Paul Strathern

Author:Paul Strathern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

In 1922 he too would leave Russia, returning to Germany where he joined the Bauhaus, whose stated aim was: ‘To attempt to unify the principles of mass production with individual artistic vision and to combine aesthetics with everyday function.’ This could have been (and perhaps should have been) the ambition of Moscow’s new Revolutionary art scene too. Ironically, the one to recognise this was Adolf Hitler, who in 1933 closed down the Bauhaus on the grounds of its ‘communist intellectualism’.

A further twist was added to the new Russian art scene by Vladimir Tatlin, who had been born in Moscow in 1885. Tatlin’s prolific activities spread over painting, sculpture, architecture and design. He is best remembered today for the so-called Tatlin Tower. This 1,300-foot spiral tower made of glass and iron was intended to surpass the Eiffel Tower in both scale complexity and utility. Its double-helix spirals contract as they rise, giving the illusion of leaning, and the entire structure is supported by a large diagonal steel girder. Its lowest level contained a large glass cube, intended to revolve once a year. This was to house the legislature of the Comintern (the Communist International organisation working for world revolution). The volume contained above this, which made one revolution a month, was a pyramid intended for the Comintern executive. Above this was a cylinder, turning one revolution a day, to house the Comintern propaganda services. And at the peak of the tower was a hemisphere, revolving hourly, to house the Comintern radio station, capable of broadcasting through a loudspeaker, as well as projecting slogans onto the clouds in the sky.

Here was a symbolic combination of architecture and sculpture, which in its way expressed the communist ideal as explicitly as the Bauhaus. It had a clarity of purpose that still seemed to elude the politicians. It was also, in the words of the twenty-first-century US architect Kim Grant, an ‘ironic monument to the economic and technological limitations of early Soviet life’.

However, all that Tatlin was ever to build of his tower was a 22-foot steel model. The fate of Tatlin’s actual model remains a mystery, though various copies of it have since been constructed in Paris, London and even Moscow. It is also claimed that some decades later a follower of Tatlin adapted his design to construct two pylons carrying heavy electric cables across a wide river in eastern Russia, where they are said to stand to this day, unrecognised, yet fulfilling their purpose.

This art as metaphor, metaphor as art, would extend one stage further with the painting of Kazimir Malevich, who began as a Futurist but went on to invent Suprematism. This was to be an abstract art founded upon ‘the supremacy of pure artistic feeling’. Its supreme and characteristic work is a black square, followed some years later by ‘white on white’.

In so many ways, the description of these artists and their works tells it all. It would be difficult to dream up such a symbolic resumé of the development and fate of post-Revolutionary Russian life.

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