Sculpture: The Most Constructive

Who invented constructivism? The question might once have seemed academic. But in the past decade as art has trended ever more sharply in the direction of hard-edged abstract geometry — in color-field and op painting, in kinetic and minimal sculpture, constructivism has been increasingly recognized as a wellspring of ideas that many of to day's artists find congenial and espouse as their own.

Constructivism began in Russia as a spidery brand of pure and formal abstraction. Some proclaim Naum Gabo as its founder; some argue that his brother, Antoine Pevsner, has an equal claim; and some urge the case of Painter Kasimir Malevich. Now Stockholm's Modern Museum has mounted an exhibit of paintings, photographs and models designed to show that Vladimir Tallin (1885-1953) was the most constructive constructivist of all.

Tatlin's influence has long been obscured by the fact that, as a dutiful Communist, he knuckled under in the 1920s, when the Communists decided Socialist realism would be the only acceptable art form. While Gabo and Pevsner fled to the West, Tatlin ended his days in Russia as an obscure drafts man and stage designer, experimenting with Leonardo-like flying machines. (The Soviet government apparently still thinks so little of him that it refused to lend any work to the Stockholm show.) But in retrospect, argues the Modern Museum's Pontus Hulten, "Tatlin is emerging ever more clearly as one of the few really great figures of 20th century art. His ideas mean more at present for many of the younger artists than Picasso or the surrealists."

Tatlin's constructivist ideas were inspired by a visit to Paris, where he saw Pablo Picasso's cubist collages. He returned to startle Moscow in 1915 with an exhibit of totally abstract collages made of tin, piping and paper. "Scandal!" cried the critics. Tatlin responded by coining the word constructivism, indicating that his art was essentially creative rather than destructive. Malevich, Gabo and others thereupon declared themselves constructivists.

In the years following the Revolution, the constructivists published manifestos, attained key posts in Soviet schools and workshops, and succeeded in tying their artistic ideals to the official Soviet Marxist dogma. Tatlin continued to design abstract collages, experimenting with industrial materials: zinc, cables, iron, stucco, glass and asphalt. He maintained that constructivism was the true art of the masses because it was part of the machine age. It could be mass-produced, it married impractical art to socially useful architecture, and it represented a departure from the decadent realism of the Czarist past. With mixed feeling, Berlin's Dadaist Raoul Hausmann contrived a photomontage "portrait" of Tatlin in which his brain is a mass of machinery topped by a dentist's drill.