Model Exhibition* - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Model Exhibition*

MARIA GOUGH

Despite the fact that it was never realized at full scale, Vladimir Tatlin’s
long-lost model for his Monument to the Third International (1920) remains to this
day the most widely known work of the Soviet avant-garde. A visionary proposal
for a four-hundred-meter tower in iron and glass conceived at the height of the
Russian Civil War, the monument was to house the headquarters of the Third
Internazionale, or Comintern, the international organization of Communist,
socialist, and other left-wing parties and workers’ organizations founded in
Moscow in the wake of the October Revolution with the objective of fomenting
revolutionary agitation abroad. Constructed in his spacious Petrograd studio,
which was once the mosaics workshop of the imperial Academy of Art, Tatlin’s
approximately 1:80 scale model comprises a skeletal wooden armature of two
upward-moving spirals and a massive diagonal girder, within which are stacked
four revolving geometrical volumes made out of paper, these last set in motion
by means of a rotary crank located underneath the display platform. In the pro-
posed monument-building, these volumes were to contain the Comintern’s
legislature, executive branch, press bureau, and radio station. According to the
later recollection of Tevel’ Schapiro, who assisted Tatlin in his construction of
the model, two large arch spans at ground level were designed so that the tower
could straddle the banks of the river Neva in Petrograd, the birthplace of the
1917 revolutions.

Lost since the mid-1920s, Tatlin’s original model has been reconstructed sev-
eral times at the behest of exhibition curators. The first such undertaking was by
Ulf Linde and Per Olof Ultvedt for Pontus Hulten at the Moderna Museet in
Stockholm in the late ’60s. Some two decades later, a team led by Dmitrii Dimakov
at the Penza Art School—where Tatlin had once been a student—produced a
reconstruction for Anatolii Strigalev and Jürgen Harten’s traveling retrospective of
the artist’s work in 1993–94; this version is now on permanent view at the State

* Earlier versions of this essay were presented in 2012–13 at the Museum Tinguely, Northwestern
Università, Harvard University, and the annual conference of the College Art Association—my warm
thanks to the respective conveners of those events: Roland Wetzel, Anna Szech, Gian Casper Bott,
Christina Kiaer, Robert Bird, Juliet Koss, Claire Grace, and Kevin Lotery. A short excerpt from an earli-
er draft appeared without illustrations in Tatlin: Neue Kunst für eine neue Welt: Internationales Symposium,
ed. Museum Tinguely (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013), pag. 42–47.

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Vladimir Tatlin and assistants with the
model for Monument to the Third
Internazionale. Petrograd. 1920.

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Model Exhibition

Tret’iakov Gallery in Moscow. Over the years there have been several others.1
Artists, pure, have played a role in shoring up the iconic status of Tatlin’s monu-
ment project, his original model serving as a generous interlocutor for Dan Flavin
and Paul Thek in the ’60s and ’70s, rispettivamente. Since the dissolution of the Soviet
Union in 1991, Ai Weiwei, Michael Rakowitz, Michel Aubry, Kcho [Alexis Leyva
Machado], Yuri Avvakumov, and Aristarkh Chernyshev and Aleksei Shulgin,
among numerous others, have eulogized, paraphrased, ironized, and otherwise
recycled it.2 In the ’90s, architect Takehiko Nagakura used digital technology to
afford it, virtually speaking, full scale and a physical site. Over the course of some
five decades, meanwhile, art historians and critics have repeatedly analyzed the
monument’s form, construction, utopianism, Futurism, Constructivism, feasibility,
ideology, symbology, and political significance.3

There is at least one aspect of Tatlin’s original model that has never been
researched, Tuttavia, and that is its exhibition in two large-scale trade fairs held in
Moscow in 1920 E 1921, one state-sponsored, the other organized by the
Comintern itself. Drawing upon reports published in daily newspapers at the time,
the present essay offers a preliminary account of the model’s exhibition value both
as a platform for discussion and as an icon of Communist spectacle, my ultimate
objective being to suggest its role and significance in the formation of what would
soon become a new medium for the Russian avant-garde, most notably in the
hands of El Lissitzky: namely, the Soviet trade fair. Though the involvement of
progressive artists in this mode of exhibition practice was novel in the early ’20s, Esso
is worth remembering that the trade fair itself had been around for almost a mil-
lennium. A showcase for the promotion of goods manufactured under capitalist
relations of production, its earliest manifestations date to the rise of mercantile
capitalism, while the Industrial Revolution subsequently spurred its exponential
proliferation. In the wake of October, Tuttavia, the Soviet administration sought
to reimagine the trade fair for Communist purposes.

Before entering into my main subject here, some introductory words about
Tatlin’s initial conceptualization of the project and his construction of the model

1. On the various reconstructions see, inter alia, Troels Andersen, Vladimir Tatlin (Stockholm:
Moderna Museet, 1968); Dimitri Dimakov, “Nasha prodelannaia rabota: Rekonstruktsiia modeli
Pamiatnika III Internationala,” in Vladimir Tatlin, Retrospektive, ed. Anatolii Strigalev and Jürgen Harten
(Cologne: DuMont, 1993), pag. 53–60; Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution (Nuovo
porto: Stampa dell'Università di Yale, 2009), P. 236, N. 53; and Nathalie Leleu, “‘Let Us Place the Eye Under the
Control of Touch’: Replicas and Replicators of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International:
The Great Adventure of Pontus Hulten,” in Tatlin: New Art for a New World, ed. Museum Tinguely
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), pag. 123–29.
2. A detailed analysis of the many and varied recyclings remains to be written; in the meantime, Vedere
Jürgen Harten, “Tatlin: A Legend of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde,” in Tatlin: New Art for a New
World, pag. 198–209.
3. See the major essays and books on Tatlin’s tower by Troels Andersen, Klaus Bollinger and
Florian Medicus, John Bowlt, Svetlana Boym, Dmitrii Dimakov, Hubertus Gassner, Jürgen Harten,
Christina Lodder, Norbert Lynton, John Milner, James Nisbet, Margit Rowell, Jyrki Siukonen, Anatolii
Strigalev, and Larissa Zhadova.

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OCTOBER

are in order. As is well known, the Monument to the Third International had its gene-
sis in Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda (1918), which proposed the
demolition of imperial monuments and the creation and erection of fifty new
monuments honoring outstanding figures in the revolutionary tradition, including
philosophers, writers, scientists, artists, performing artists, and musicians. IL
implementation of this plan had been entrusted to Tatlin in his capacity as some-
time head of the Moscow branch of IZO Narkompros, the fine-arts section of the
People’s Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment. With the assistance of
colleagues, Tatlin sent a memorandum to Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s
Commissars) in summer 1918 proposing that “the monuments should be erected
in boulevards, public gardens and the like in all districts of Moscow, with quota-
tions or maxims engraved on pedestals or surroundings so that these monuments
should appear like street rostra from which living words should fly to the mass of
the people, stimulating minds and consciousness of thought.”4 Far from exclu-
sively memorializing the dead, Perciò, the new monuments were to be
disseminators of “living words,” and thus specifically agitational in function.

But in the process of unveiling what turned out to be one conventional sculp-
tural bust or figure after another by those artists who contributed to the plan—a
total disappointment given his own radical practice of counter-reliefs in the 1910s—
Tatlin decided to propose his own monument to the revolution. On the likely
nature of his initial proposal, we can refer to a substantial article published in March
1919 by his friend, colleague, and apologist, the art critic Nikolai Punin, in the
Narkompros-sponsored futurist newspaper, Iskusstvo kommuny (Art of the com-
mune).5 (This article is not to be confused with the better-known booklet on the
monument that Punin prepared in summer 1920.6) Long thought to ventriloquize
the ever-laconic Tatlin, with whom Punin enjoyed an especially close relationship at
the time, IL 1919 text might also be understood as representing a dialogue or col-
laboration between the two, or even, at the most extreme, a programmatic directive
by the critic, who had become the head of the Petrograd branch of IZO
Narkompros in 1918. But even if we cannot be fully certain as to the precise circum-
stances of its composition, this early essay remains an informative text that explicitly
connects Tatlin’s project to a pan-European futurist aesthetic.

Punin opens the essay with a polemical critique of the Plan for Monumental
Propaganda, which he considers an utter failure due to a complete mismatch
between the task at hand—homage to the revolution—and the means employed

4. Vladimir Tatlin, “Memorandum of the Moscow Artistic Collegium of the People’s Commissariat
of Education to the Council of People’s Commissars, on the Erection in Moscow of 50 Monuments to
Outstanding Figures in the Area of Revolutionary and Social Activity, in Philosophy, Letteratura,
Scienze, and the Arts,” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova, trans. Colin Wright et al. (New York:
Rizzoli, 1988), P. 185.
5. Nikolai Punin, “O pamiatnikakh,” Iskusstvo kommuny 14 (Marzo 9, 1919), pag. 2–3; partial trans.
in Andersen, Vladimir Tatlin, pag. 56–57.
6. Nikolai Punin, Pamiatnik III Internatsionala (Petrograd: IZO Narkompros, 1920); trans. as “The
Monument to the Third International,” in Zhadova, Tatlin, pag. 344–47.

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Model Exhibition

thus far, namely, figurative representation in traditional sculptural mediums.
Having dismissed all contributions to date, he then turns to the explication and
promotion of Tatlin’s alternative proposal for a monument to the revolution,
which he describes as a radical synthesis of architecture, painting, and sculpture.
He offers little apropos the precise form this synthesis will take, revealing only that
it will comprise a monolithic structure of simple geometric volumes, such as cubes,
cylinders, spheres, cones, segments of circles, spherical planes, and sections
thereof. He is much more eager to impart a sense of Tatlin’s conception of the
monument as a kind of multimedia agitational center that would embrace a futur-
ist emphasis on perpetual motion and the new media communication
technologies of wireless telegraphy, radio broadcasting, and film.

The monument’s interior will contain halls for gymnastics that can be uti-
lized for different purposes on demand, thereby factoring “continuous mobility”
(nepreryvnaia podvizhnost’) into their very functionality. An “agitation center” will
circulate proclamations and leaflets throughout the city by means of a special
squad of motorcycles and automobiles; housed within a dedicated garage inside
the monument, this squad will serve as a mobile and ever-ready agitational appara-
tus. Visitors to the building will be set in motion—there will be no standing
around in one place, and certainly never any sitting down. Elevators will transport
guests from one level of the monument to another. At one moment visitors may
chance upon a live orator declaiming aloud an agitational slogan, and at the next,
a radio broadcast of the latest news, government decrees, resolutions, and techno-
logical inventions. Through its emphasis on perpetual motion, Punin asserts, IL
monument will become a space of spectacular enchantment, of spectral wonder-
ment, of spectacle itself, one that is truly “worthy of our revolution.”

Attached to the monument’s exterior will be a gigantic film screen for the
projection of newsreels detailing the latest information on cultural and political
life from around the globe; at night, slogans will be projected directly onto the sky,
which brings to mind the poet Velimir Khlebnikov’s 1918 proposal to convert
clouds into projection screens.7 Like the Eiffel Tower with which it is clearly in dia-
logue, Tatlin’s monument will boast a radio antenna powerful enough to send and
receive international broadcasts, thereby mitigating the restricted flow of informa-
tion under the Western blockade. It will house a telephone exchange and a
telegraph station, along with other such “information apparatuses,” as well as a
printing workshop and studios. Punin emphasizes that these various technological
features will constitute not just the monument’s “content” but its very form and
structure. Fantastic in the extreme, Tatlin’s initial conceptualization of the monu-
ment—at least as reported by Punin in March 1919—takes the form of something
like a gigantic, mobility-mad, multitasking, spectacle-producing communication
device dedicated to revolutionary agitation.

7. On Khlebnikov’s proposal, see Jyrki Siukonen, Uplifted Spirits, Earthbound Machines: Studies on
Artists and the Dream of Flight, 1900–1935 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjalisuuden Seura, 2001), P. 155.

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OCTOBER

It was not until March 1920, a full year after the publication of Punin’s text,
Tuttavia, that Tatlin finally began construction of his model with the assistance of
Schapiro, Iosif Meerzon, and Pavel Vinogradov.8 In the process, much of his early
futurist fantasy about mobile media saturation fell away, to be replaced by an all-
consuming struggle to wrest from the
obdurate materiality of wood a dynamic
structure worthy of the revolution. UN
few archival photographs stage the
process by which Tatlin and his team—
along with friends and associates, come
as the experimental painter and
Narkompros staffer Sofia Dymshits-
Tolstaia
and Punin himself—
hammered the model into being.9 In a
diary entry dated July 17, 1920, Punin
records his experience of life and work
in Tatlin’s studio at the time, detailing
the collective manual labor, hunger,
shortage, base humor, and even infan-
tile behavior that underpinned the
construction process: “This evening,"
Punin
IL
‘Monument’ with Tatlin. We worked on
gluing the rods. . . . [Dymshits-]Tolstaia
worked on her stained glass and cooked
kasha. . . . They eat like sailors and, like
the ‘dregs of society,’ fight one another
for food from the tender’s hands, Quale
could break horseshoes from all the work they’ve done. . . . They eat a whole pot-
ful . . . it is merry; as at home, in the nursery. They make jokes . . . with all their
might about painting, art, modernism, and so on. If a patch doesn’t work on some-
one’s rod, they yell out laughing, ‘Modernism!’ and Tatlin slowly and sternly
admonishes, ‘Work on you swine, you’ll get better.’”10

Model under construction.
Petrograd. 1920.

confides,

“I built

The model that resulted from these labors thematizes continuous mobility in
a way that is as much structural (spiraling lathes, diagonal girder) and literal
(revolving volumes) as it is technological (the press bureau and radio station
housed in its upper two volumes, the latter continuing “the monument in[A] IL

8. Listed on a poster published at the time are the names of several other assistants who helped
construct the model, including Pchel’nikova, Terletskii, Dormidontov, Stakanov, and Khapaev; Vedere
Anatolii Strigalev, “Iskusstvo konstruktivistov: Ot vystavki—k vystavke (1914–32),” Sovetskoe iskusstvoz-
nanie (Moscow) 27 (1991), P. 140.
9. Dymshits-Tolstaia was responsible for the design of the monument’s glass components (Vedere
ibid., P. 140), probably because of her novel experiments at the time with glass as a support for
painting and collage.
10. Nikolai Punin, The Diaries of Nikolai Punin: 1904–1953, ed. Sidney Mona and Jennifer Greene
Krupala, trans. Jennifer Greene Krupala (Austin: University of Texas Press 1999), P. 67.

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Model Exhibition

air,” as Viktor Shklovsky put it11). “The whole form is vacillating like a steel snake
held together and united into a structure through one common movement of all
its parts so as to rise above the ground,” Punin writes in summer 1920. “The form
strives to overcome the material and the force of gravity; the force of resistance is
great and massive; by flexing its muscles the form is searching for the way out
along the most resilient and dynamic lines the world knows of—the spirals. They
are full of movement, aspiration, and speed, and they are as tight as a creative will
and an arm-muscle strained with holding a hammer.”12

In September 1920, even before it was completed, there was talk of mobiliz-
ing Tatlin’s model on a Petrograd square during the anniversary celebrations
that November, as part of a mass spectacle (massovoe zrelishche) dedicated to gar-
nering public and party support for the full-scale realization of his monument to
the revolution, but this plan did not come to fruition.13 Instead, the model
began its public life during the November celebrations in the form of an exhibi-
tion held in Tatlin’s studio and open to the public from November 8 through
Dicembre 1, 1920, by which point it had been repurposed as a monument to the
Third International. The showing included two related drawings and a slew of
wall-mounted programmatic slogans.14 Posters disseminated throughout the city
announced both the show’s opening and a public forum to which representa-

11. Viktor Shklovsky, “Pamiatnik Tret’emu Internatsionalu,” Zhizn’ iskusstva, January 5–9, 1921;
trans. as “The Monument to the Third International,” in Zhadova, Tatlin, P. 343.
12. Punin, “The Monument to the Third International,” p. 345.
13. Krasnaia gazeta, settembre 19, 1920; cited in Anatolii Strigalev, “O proekte Pamiatnika III-emu
Internatsionalu khudozhnika V. Tatlina,” in Voprosy sovetskogo izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva i arkhitektury
(Moscow, 1973), pag. 417–18.
14. See Strigalev, “Iskusstvo konstruktivistov,” p. 139.

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Vladimir Tatlin. Elevation drawing
for the model. 1920.

OCTOBER

Poster announcing
public exhibition of the
model in Tatlin’s
studio, Petrograd.
novembre 1920.

tives of trade unions, mili-
tary units, and naval crews
were invited.15

meeting was held

A similar discussion
In
Moscow at the Paul Cézanne Club on Decem –
ber 14, 1920, in order to debate the ideological,
aesthetic, and utilitarian merits of the project,
as well as its feasibility from an engineering
point of view. At the meeting Tatlin presented
a “very short paper,” to which Lissitzky gave a
formal response. “I could have destroyed the
entire monument (photographs of the model
and my conversation with Tatlin only increased
the power of my research),” he writes to his
friend and mentor in Vitebsk, Kazimir

Malevich, one of Tatlin’s long-standing rivals:

Like Unovis, Tuttavia, I believe that we should support it as a concrete
new achievement. . . . I nevertheless called on everyone to criticize and
analyze the construction, demonstrating that the synthesis of painting,
sculpture, and architecture is self-deception, that its synthesis with utili-
tarianism is a childish lack of consideration and fiction, that the relati-
onship with the material is pernicious, that the construction is aesthetic
and artistic, and not creative (dismantled, I saw that the model can
stand without the spiral, it wears it like a general wears the order of St.
Andrew) and that for a whole series of reasons listed by me, it is the sum
of all the mistakes of the past and the desire to correspond not to Venus,
but to modernity.16

Lissitzky adds that Naum Gabo seconded his criticisms, while Osip Brik and
Vladimir Mayakovsky—who would famously celebrate Tatlin’s tower as “the first
monument without a beard”—leapt, by contrast, to its defense.17

Later that month, the model was dismantled and shipped to Moscow, Dove
Tatlin reassembled it for display in the first of two exhibitions held in the Dom
Soiuzov (House of Unions), the headquarters of the central Soviet trade-union
organization. An imperial-period building located on Okhotnyi ryad near the
Kremlin, the House of Unions played a legendary role in early Soviet history—it

15. See Zhizn’ iskusstva, novembre 12, 1920; cited in Strigalev, “O proekte Pamiatnika III-emu
Internatsionalu khudozhnika V. Tatlina,” p. 418.
16. El Lissitzky, Moscow, to Kazimir Malevich, Vitebsk, Dicembre 21, 1920; Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, Khardzhiev Archive, inv. NO. 729, folio pages 2–4; trans. Kenneth MacInnes in In Malevich’s
Circle: Confederates, Students, Followers in Russia, 1920s–1950s, ed. Irina Karasik (St. Petersburg: Palace
Editions, 2003), P. 53.
17. See Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (Nuovo paradiso: Stampa dell'Università di Yale, 1983), P. 61.

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Tatlin’s installation of the model at the
central press agency’s exhibition in honor
of the Eighth Congress of Soviets, House
of Unions, Moscow. Dicembre 1920.

was here, Per esempio, that deceased Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin himself,
were laid in state for public viewing. But the building also seems to have served as
an early venue for a then newly emerging mode of exhibition practice, the Soviet
trade fair. The first of the exhibitions in which Tatlin’s model appeared opened in
late December 1920 in honor of the Eighth Congress of Soviets.18 An assembly of
representatives of local councils from across Soviet Russia—and thus nominally
the highest political and administrative organ of the new state—the congress met
in the capital a few times a year for the purposes of formulating, ratifying, E,
increasingly, rubber-stamping Bolshevik Party policy. (It was at the Eighth
Congress, for example, that Lenin presented GOELRO, the national plan for the
electrification of Soviet Russia.) In the exhibition—an elaborate exercise in Soviet
self-presentation for the benefit of congress members who had gathered in
Moscow from near and far as well as the general public—Tatlin’s model stands
adjacent to shelves and shelves of printed matter in what is now known as the
Buffet, adjacent to the building’s storied Colonnade Hall.19

According to a favorable and informative review published on the front page

18. This photograph was first published in Zhadova, Tatlin, P. 279, fig. 181.
19. This identification is made on the basis of a comparison of period photographs of the interior of
the building.

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OCTOBER

of the daily government-run newspaper Izvestiia by Mikhail Kol’tsov, a young jour-
nalist who would later gain prominence as the founding editor of Ogonek (Little
flame), SSSR na stroike (USSR in construction), and other photo-illustrated maga-
zines, the overall curator of the congress show was one Boris Malkin, a literary
figure and party activist.20 Malkin is best known to art historians as the head of the
centralized IZOGIZ—the State Publishing House for Art—during the cultural revo-
lution of the first Five-Year Plan in the late 1920s and early ’30s, and thus as the
government official who exercised monopoly control over the distribution of
graphic-design commissions to poster artists such as Gustavs Klucis, Valentina
Kulagina, and Aleksandr Deineka. But in 1920 Malkin headed the central press
agency for the distribution of printed matter, Tsentropechat’, which reported
directly to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, VTISK. On December 8,
1920, a notice appeared on the front page of the party newspaper Pravda calling
for the various people’s commissariats to send to Malkin’s office sundry exhibition
materials—including illustrations, charts, and reports—pertaining to their work
and achievements to date.21 The congress exhibition thus represented a vast
expansion of the activities of a traditional press agency; where once Malkin might
have been responsible for a book fair, he was now in charge of organizing a vast
trade fair that would attempt to survey and thereby promote every area of Soviet
endeavor over the past three years. For its part, Narkompros sent along Tatlin’s
model for inclusion in the show, along with much other material.

Kol’tsov refers to the show as a specifically “Soviet trade fair” (sovetskaia iar-
marka) that showcases the Communist emancipation of labor and the growth of
proletarian resourcefulness, in sharp contrast to its capitalist counterparts. He credits
Malkin’s “indefatigable and restless energy”—and the help of dozens of assistants—
for bringing the show to fruition in just two weeks. The building being jam-packed
with visitors, the mood is festive and celebratory, Kol’tsov reports, in keeping with the
exhibition’s objective of honoring and entertaining congress members. He defines
the exhibition as qualitatively different from “hundreds” of other ostensibly similar
shows, with their dreary diagrams and charts tacked up on the wall, didactic shows
that nobody visits. Malkin has produced, instead, a total transformation of the House
of Unions into what Kol’tsov calls an “enlightening spectacle” (pouchitelnoe zrelishche).
Stuffed to the gills, not a single square inch of free space is to be found.

No photograph accompanies Kol’tsov’s article, but one found elsewhere
reveals an elaborate array of wall-mounted banners and slogans spewing forth
from a central globe that transforms the building’s grand ceremonial staircase into
a spectacular agitational stage. In the left foreground, a trio of Red Army men are
fully absorbed in their reading matter, notwithstanding the visual noise that
engulfs them. Another photograph shows the contents of gallery no. 7—one of the
enfilade of spaces that composes the foyer of Colonnade Hall—a Young Pioneer
sits absorbed at a desk, the space around her crammed with examples of Soviet
production and details of its achievements, the display clearly outdoing the hall’s

20. Mikhail Kol’tsov, “Sovetskaia iarmarka,” Izvestiia, Dicembre 26, 1920, P. 1.
21. Pravda, Dicembre 8, 1920, P. 1.

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View of main staircase (top)
and gallery no. 7 (bottom)
at the Eighth Congress of
Soviets exhibition.

imperial-period architectural ornament. Other exhibition halls included a vast
range of industrial and consumer products, along with a stage maquette for a play
directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, an enormous quantity of books and pho-
tographs, several agitational films, and the first-ever Russian radio-telephone, Questo
last apparently even in working order.

Finalmente, in the gallery showcasing the work and achievements of the central
press agency itself, there was Tatlin’s model, displayed in conjunction with several
kiosks that busily distributed printed matter to congress members. “Right there,"

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OCTOBER

Kol’tsov writes, “the Monument to the Third International towers above—a gigantic
mind-bending thing made of iron and glass [sic].” Kol’tsov elaborates no further,
Tuttavia, despite the bewildering impression the model must surely have made in
this particular context. According to a review of recent Russian exhibitions pub-
lished in Veshch’ (Berlin) in spring 1922 by none other than Lissitzky, Tatlin and
two of his assistants stood beside the model after they’d finished installing it in
order to explain “the meaning and purpose of the towering monument” to repre-
sentatives from as far afield as Siberia, Turkestan, Crimea, and Ukraine.22 Detailed
explanatory notes were also hung alongside it for the further edification of
visitors.23 In the daily bulletin of the congress, Tatlin, Schapiro, Meerzon, E
Vinogradov published a brief statement in which they drew a parallel between
political and aesthetic revolution, claimed a pedigree for the monument project in
Tatlin’s sculptural practice of the mid-1910s, and concluded with a polemical call
for the creation of a new world: “The fruits of this are models which give rise to
discoveries serving the creation of a new world and which call upon producers to
control the forms of the new life around us.”24 Tatlin’s efforts to enlighten visitors
about the nature and significance of his model were likely at least in part an
attempt to secure the political and fiscal support of the Congress of Soviets and
the party leadership, which would be essential for its construction at full scale.

But to understand why Tatlin’s model was located in the exhibition hall of the
central press agency itself—rather than in, Dire, the one devoted to Narkompros—it is
worth noting that Malkin’s agency had expanded its purview considerably since its
foundation. With a staff in Moscow alone numbering some 4,000, the agency was
responsible for the production of all kinds of print media—newspapers, journals, slo-
gans, books, brochures, posters, recensioni, leaflets, and proclamations—and for the
distribution of such media through its vast network of branches, railway-station kiosks,
and agitational points or centers (agit-punkty) located throughout Soviet Russia. Ma
the agency also oversaw what was called oral agitation, producing gramophone
recordings of speeches delivered by the Bolshevik leadership, including fifteen
records by Lenin alone, which it then broadcast through agit-train stops and its net-
work of kiosks.25 Given the expanded role of the agency in Soviet culture during the
civil-war period, the model would have had special appeal for Malkin and his col-

22. Ulen (pseud. El Lissitzky), “Die Austellungen in Russland,” Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand (Berlin) 1–2
(March–April 1922), P. 19. Despite his negative comments at the Cézanne Club in 1920, Lissitzky was quite
positive in his public presentation of Tatlin’s project to Western European audiences in 1922–23; see his
“New Russian Art: A Lecture” (1923), trans. in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans.
Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittall (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1980), P. 342. He even incorporated
a photograph of Tatlin at work on the model into a photo-collage maquette for the illustration of his
friend Ilya Ehrenburg’s Shest’ poviestei o legkikh kontsakh (Six Stories with Easy Endings) (1922).
23. Aleksei Sidorov, “Punin. N.: Pamiatnik III Internatsionala: Proekt khud. V. E. Tatlina,” Pechat’ i
revoliutsiia 2 (August–October 1921), P. 217.
24. Vladimir Tatlin, Tevel’ Schapiro, Iosif Meerzon, and Pavel Vinogradov, “Nasha predstoiashchaia
rabota,” VIII S”ezd Sovetov (Ezhednevnyi biulleten’ s”ezda), Gennaio 1, 1921, P. 11; trans. in Zhadova, Tatlin,
P. 239.
25. On the central press agency, see Alexei Nazarov, Oktiabr’ i kniga: Sozdanie sovetskikh izdatel’stv i
formirovanie massovogo chitatelia, 1917–1923 (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pag. 222–31.

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Model Exhibition

leagues as a proposal for a monument in the form not just of a building but of a
mobility-conscious, multimedia agitational center.

Tatlin’s model remained in the House of Unions after the exhibition had
closed, and was then repurposed for a second trade fair, this time in honor of the
international delegates to the Third Congress of the Comintern, which met in
Moscow in summer 1921. (This show should be distinguished from the conven-
tional exhibition of easel paintings that was contemporaneously organized in
honor of the Third Congress in the Hotel Kontinental’, where some of its dele-
gates were residing.)26 A detailed exhibition review published in Izvestiia reports
that Tatlin’s model served once again as the centerpiece of the central press
agency’s installation, the walls of which were lined with thousands of brochures
and books “in all the languages of the world.” The show’s other exhibition halls
were dedicated to the exposition of the history of the Bolshevik Party, the Red

Group portrait of dele-
gates to the Third
Congress of the
Comintern, with a par-
tial view of an exhibition
of modernist paintings.
Hotel Kontinental’,
Moscow. Estate 1921.

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Army, Soviet agriculture, health, formazione scolastica, diplomacy, and industrial production,
the international workers’ movement, the international Communist press, inven-
tions and advances in the realm of transportation and communication
technologies (including a new kind of telegraph machine by the engineer
Trusevich), and so on. At the exhibition’s entrance, a radio transmitter—a power-
ful symbol of Soviet Russia’s link to the rest of the world, and thus of the
Comintern itself—greeted delegates while they perused monumental schematic
maps of the country’s vast radio network.27

There Tatlin’s model remained at least through the following year, Quando
Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar of Narkompros, lambasted it in a discussion of

26. See Aleksandra Shatskikh, “A Brief History of Obmokhu,” in The Great Utopia: The Russian and
Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992), P. 264.
27. Anon, “Okolo kongressa: Vystavka Kominterna,” Izvestiia, Luglio 6, 1921, P. 2.

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OCTOBER

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Anatoly Lunacharsky having his portrait
painted. Kislovodsk. Estate 1926.

art’s role in the service of the Soviet state published in Izvestiia in January 1922.
Noting that the model was still on view in the House of Unions, he dismissed it as a
“paradoxical” structure, compared it unfavorably to the Eiffel Tower, and forewarned
that the realization in Moscow or Petrograd of “such a product from the creative
imagination of one of the most important artists of the leftist school” would be a mat-
ter of very grave concern.28 These harsh words may surprise us somewhat, given that
Lunacharsky is known for his substantial, if never entirely unambivalent, support for
leftist and futurist artists in the immediate wake of the October Revolution ("IL
dynamism and methods of collective creative work which are so characteristic of
futurist art stand in some sort of relationship to what the proletariat may create in the
artistic field,” he once said).29 But by 1920 he had grown impatient with both the
avant-garde’s radical experiments and its polemical intolerance toward more conven-
tional tendencies: “Futurism has dropped behind,” a furious Mayakovsky reported
the commissar as having declared that year, “it already stinks. . . . [T]here is no need
to look for any Picasso for the proletariat.”30 Comparable derision inflects his pub-
lished judgment on Tatlin’s tower, notwithstanding the fact that the latter had been
produced under the auspices of Narkompros, the commissariat of which he himself
was the head. But Lunacharsky was far from alone in his criticism. Also largely nega-

28. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i iskusstvo,” Izvestiia, Gennaio 29, 1922, P. 2.
29. Anatolii Lunacharskii, Ob izobrazitel’nom iskusstve (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1967), vol. 2,
pag. 301–2; quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of
Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970), P. 127.
30. Quoted in Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, P. 155.

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Model Exhibition

tive was Lev Trotsky’s commentary just a couple of years later: Calling into question
the purposefulness of the artist’s “own personal invention,” Trotsky writes that “meet-
ings are not necessarily held in a cylinder and the cylinder does not necessarily have
to rotate. I remember seeing once when a child, a wooden temple built in a beer bot-
tle. This fired my imagination, but I did not ask myself at that time what it was for.
Tatlin proceeds by a reverse method; he wants to construct a beer bottle . . . Quale
would sit in a spiral concrete temple. But for the moment, I cannot refrain from the
question: What is it for?”31

After its drubbing by the commissar in 1922, the trail of the original model goes
cold. The next reference we have is only to a crude redaction of its skeletal armature
that was slapped together by art students in 1925 and mobilized as a float in a May
Day parade in Leningrad; megaphone in hand, a participant addresses members of
the party leadership who are standing in the bleachers, including possibly Stalin.
That same year, Tatlin executed a much smaller and simplified version of his original
model for the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes
held in the Grand Palais in Paris. Of the original model itself, Tuttavia, there seem to
be no known sightings after 1922.

31. See Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (New York: Internazionale
Publishers, 1925), pag. 247 –48.

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Anonymous redaction of Tatlin’s
model for May Day demonstration.
Leningrad, 1925.

OCTOBER

Nevertheless, the spectacularization of Tatlin’s model in the House of
Unions in the early ’20s suggests that there is another aspect to the long and gen-
erous legacy of Monument to the Third International, namely, its role in the formation
of a new medium for avant-garde practice, that of the Soviet trade fair. In 1923,
numerous progressive artists would be among those who contributed to the design
and installation of 196 pavilions at the inaugural All-Russian Agricultural and
Handicraft Industries Exhibition, which was held in Moscow’s Gorky Park. In
1924, Klucis and Sergei Sen’kin designed the installation of a major agitational
print-media exhibition in honor of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in
Georgievskii Hall in the Great Kremlin Palace. But it was Lissitzky—who had
reviewed Tatlin’s exhibition of his model in the House of Unions, as if already per-
ceiving in the trade fair a new arena for artistic production—who would become
the leading Soviet designer of exhibitions in the second half of the ’20s.

In 1926, while teaching interior and furniture design at the Vkhutemas in
Moscow, Lissitzky designed a prototype for the exhibition of contemporary art, Quale
he installed as the Raum für konstructive Kunst at the International Art Exhibition in
Dresden. Far from being a one-off work of installation art, this space was designed to
showcase not only his own newly found interest in issues of standardization in archi-
tectura (it “should present a standard
[Standard] for spaces in which new art
is shown to the public”32), but also his
companion Sophie Küppers’s intrepid
business as a dealer in pan-European
modern art. As such, the Dresden
space represents a liminal stage in the
artist’s trajectory. Though he would
reprise its design for Alexander
Dorner at the Landesmuseum
Hannover in 1927–28, thereby fulfill-
ing the objective he had set
himself—to produce a prototype for
the exhibition of new art—Lissitzky
would henceforth dedicate his work in
the field of exhibition design to the
showcasing and promotion of dis-
tinctly Soviet achievements at home
and abroad, beginning with a robust
survey of recent innovations in print
media, photography, photomontage,
and graphic design in Gorky Park

Gustavs Klucis and Sergei Sen’kin. Installation of
poster display at exhibition held in honor of the Fifth
Congress of the Comintern. Moscow, summer 1924.

32. Lissitzky, “2 Demonstrationsräume,” n.d. (ca. 1926), typescript, Sprengel Museum Hannover;
trans. in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, P. 366. For an analysis of Lissitzky’s Dresden and Hannover
demonstration spaces, see Maria Gough, “Constructivism Disoriented: El Lissitzky’s Dresden and
Hannover Demonstrationsräume,” in Situating Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian
Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), pag. 77–125.

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Model Exhibition

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3

View of the Soviet pavilion at the International
Press Exhibition (“Pressa”). Cologne, 1928.
From left to right: Agitational structures by
Nikolai Simon, Gustavs Klucis, and El Lissitzky.

(All-Union Polygraphic Exhibition, 1927), and continuing with a series of collabo-
ratively produced Soviet pavilions for international trade fairs in Cologne
(International Press Exhibition or Pressa, 1928), Stuttgart (Film und Foto, or FiFo,
1929), Dresden (International Hygiene Exhibition, 1930), Leipzig (International Fur
Trade Exhibition, 1930), and beyond.33

Thanks to Benjamin Buchloh’s groundbreaking discussion of Lissitzky’s radi-
cal “transformation of modernist montage aesthetics into an instrument of mass
education and enlightenment” in the pages of this journal three decades ago,34
the artist’s Soviet pavilions are best known today for their monumental photo-
graphic friezes and other architectural-scale uses of photography. But the broad
transformation Buchloh describes extends also to Lissitzky’s choreography in
these same pavilions of a great mass of information in a variety of other media and

33. See Igor Riazantsev, Iskusstvo sovetskogo vystavochnogo ansamblia: 1917–1970: Raboty khudozhnikov
Moskvy i Leningrad (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1976), pag. 11–136. On the 1923 agricultural exhibi-
zione, see also the documents in Vystavochnye ansambli SSSR, 1920–1930–e gody: Materialy i dokumenty, ed.
V. P. Tolstoi (Moscow: Galart, 2006), pag. 15–34.
34. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,"Ottobre 30 (Autunno 1984), P. 118. See also the
anthology inspired by Buchloh’s analysis, Public Photographic Spaces: Propaganda Exhibitions from Pressa to The
Family of Man, 1928–55, ed. Jorge Ribalta (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008).

OCTOBER

platforms, such as books, magazines, brochures, diagrams, charts, and a motley
fleet of rotary- or electrically powered display stands, agitational structures, E
machine-like devices and contraptions, all in the service of what could be called an
enlightening spectacle, to borrow Kol’tsov’s prescient expression that I quoted ear-
lier. Just inside the main entrance to Lissitzky’s pavilion at Pressa, Per esempio, UN
crowd throngs around a towering display structure dedicated to the dissemination
of information about the role being played by trade unions in the reorganization
of the Soviet economy. Designed by Nikolai Simon, one of the team of artists who
worked on the show with Lissitzky, this agitational structure comprises a giant
hammer encircled by an agglomeration of wooden lathes and signage; a smaller
hammer and sickle punctuates the tower’s upper reaches, while a flood of printed
matter appears to spew forth from its base. This structure clearly mimics the mor-
phology of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, all the while substituting the
latter’s extraordinary sculptural inventiveness at a time of civil war and chronic
material shortage with the now fully established symbology—in the form of ham-
mer and sickle—of a Communist state on the brink of inaugurating its first
Five-Year Plan’s program of crash industrialization and forced agricultural collec-
tivization. In that very mimicry, Tuttavia, Simon’s tower reminds us that Tatlin’s
model was not only a model for a monument that was never built, but at the same
time a model for the Soviet avant-garde’s major engagement with a new medium
of spectacle and enlightenment, that of the trade fair.