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Tatlin's life is known to us in barest outline. Although a large body of his works and writings presumably still exists in the Soviet Union, these are for the most part unseen and unknown by Westerners.' The bases for study of this artist, considered the founder of constructivism, are therefore sparse: a small number of paintings, drawings, miscellaneous objects and fragments of objects; a few photographs, texts, and eyewitness reports, which are accessible outside Russia. Since no quantity of work ever found its way to the West, far less firsthand documentation is available for Tatlin than for Malevich, say, or Lissitzky. Yet Tatlin is as celebrated as they, as honored as they are for his contributions to the art of the twentieth century. We can only conjecture that the high points of his creative activity are known to us and, although few, they are, like the greater bodies of work by his better known contemporaries, exemplary and a valid point of departure. From these remaining fragments we can draw a profile of Tatlin's achievement and see that it is at one and the same time profoundly Russian and extremely modern. That is to say, Tatlin drew on the peculiarly Russian conceptions of faktura and transrational language to envision an art that would consist of a semantic encoding of pure materials. The biographical framework of Tatlin's life is fairly familiar. Born in Moscow in 1885,2 he was fifteen years younger than Malevich, eight years older
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