Clark Louis, Pitzer College
When defining communist dogma, Karl Marx wrote pages upon pages of theory—Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin did the same by designing a tower, concentrating Marx’s theory into a single page. In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, within the nascent Soviet Union grew monuments and construction projects that sought to affirm and bolster the new socialist state. This newfound revolution provided a catalyst for the transformation of artistic forms.[1] Vital to this transformation were the constructivists—in response to the growing Soviet Union, they provided an organizational framework of material expertise that Soviet art lacked, working to realize the expressions of leftist ideology, previously limited to art, through architecture. Soviet artist and writer Aleksei Gan synthesizes this aspiration, establishing that “constructivism is fighting for the intellectual and material production of communist culture!”[2] In Elements of Photography: Avant-garde Aesthetics and the Reforging of Nature, Aglaya Glebova uses the term “Promethean ambition” to describe the Soviet Union’s goal to destroy nature, imposing human dominance over the land, outlined by Soviet Revolutionary Leon Trotsky. He writes that, in the context of the revolution, it is expected that man will want to “repeatedly correct nature.”[3] Constructivist architect Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third Internationaldesign (1920) exists as the foremost example of Promethean ambition expressed through material, form, and temporal context. The photographs of Soviet Revolutionary photographer Aleksandr Rodchenko, however, solidify Tatlin’s abstract expression of Promethean ambition with depictions of real events and subject matter. I take Glebova’s term a step further in art historical discourse, exploring how it can be applied to a completely abstract art form without a complex and nuanced subject matter to depict—devoid of figurative context, Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International shows that Promethean ambition can be expressed solely through form.
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International Design
Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third Communist International design (Figure 1), with its ascending, oscillating artistic form, reaches a pure constructivist goal of ambition. Rather than expressing a specific facet of the revolution or a prominent event, Tatlin’s tower represents the goals of the revolution through engineering and abstraction, canonized within Russian Constructivism. Working under commission for the Department of Fine Arts of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment (Narkompros), Tatlin created perhaps the most ambitious and visionary architectural design in Soviet history, despite the design never coming to life. During the time between 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting, in which he created sculptural corner counter-reliefs that rejected painting as a medium in favor of an experimental, humble study of materials,[4] and the creation of his tower design, Tatlin shifted his focus away from humility into pure ambition centered around constructivism and the revolution.[5] This shift in emphasis, according to art historian John Milner, is apparent in the monument’s “scale, materials, and social content”—commissioned by Comintern, otherwise known as the Third International, as part of a larger project to replace czarist monuments, Tatlin created a design for an impossibly scaled monument, taller than the Eiffel Tower and almost holy in its unattainable form to communist causes, by and for the proletariat.[6] The tower’s leaning shape emphasizes its curvature and energy, with the outer edge of the construction consisting of two spiraling lines moving forwards and upwards. The tower’s spiral shell design makes it seem unnatural, as if its top leans far outside the land of its base. The ingenuity of the monument’s plan keeps the entire form within the confines of its base while retaining a physically impossible aesthetic. Tatlin emphasizes instability and the potential for self destruction. Due to his “determination to reveal the inner workings of his building,” a straight form was added to the outside to counter the spiraling shell’s flexibility, highlighting the general forward and upward thrust.[7]
The tower’s interior was just as ambitious as its exterior—the inside was to consist of three separate stacked structures all made of glass constantly turning at different speeds. The lowest structure, a cube, would hold meetings and conduct legislative actions for Comintern, all while rotating on an axis at the speed of one revolution per year. Above that was to be a pyramidal shape, rotating at a speed of one revolution per month, to be used for Comintern executive purposes. Finally, the uppermost structure was to be shaped like a cylinder, rotating once every day and carrying out various methods of propaganda—an information office as well as a newspaper, and the publications of brochures and manifestoes. Finally, a spherical form at the top would contain projectors intended for portraying messages onto the clouds, and a radio station.[8] Aside from the deluded ambition of proposing that such technologies actually be made, the interior of the tower highlights a clear vertical hierarchy—the propaganda departments and radio station are given the highest vantage point and are therefore regarded as the most important. Visually, they are held within the most refined shapes, a rounded cylinder and a sphere. Further, the lower sections as well as the tower structure itself serve to prop up the higher structures. The governmental functions contained in the bottom two structures are serving only to bolster the efforts of spreading communism. The hubris within these rotating structures was not an asinine attempt to show technological prowess—Tatlin, aligned with his patrons, sought to present communism as a global movement, emphasizing efforts of its dissemination. All of these glass structures would have vacuum walls to mitigate temperature, and the building would have elevators that adjust to the different rotational speeds of each structure.[9] Nikolai Punin, a Soviet theorist who wrote extensively on constructivism, further describes the tower’s significance as its ability to be both a utilitarian object and a “purely creative form.”[10] Tatlin created an image of wildly ambitious technology and immense scale to create a beacon of constructivism, and truly an image it was—given Tatlin’s lack of technical training and the vacancy of necessary mechanisms in his plans, namely those that would rotate the internal buildings, this was ultimately an impossible project.[11] Tatlin’s tower provided something for the proletariat to look to for inspiration instead of groveling with the proletariat in its humility.
Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International design exists as the most representational Russian Avant Garde example of Promethean ambition. In Tatlin’s tower, nature is only a barrier to be broken through by human ambition. Furthermore, the monument demanded prioritization during the time of its design, when a severe shortage of industrial materials in Russia in 1920 made the project wholly impossible[12]—building this tower would have been akin to building a water park in a desert. Its form seems to poke fun at the laws of physics. Even though it is generally mathematically sound, the tower looks like it should not stand, as if included in the building materials is an anti gravity device. In the words of Nikolai Punin, “oscillat[ing]…form wants to overcome the material and the force of gravity.”[13] The building’s design looks like it is actively operating within its own universe and set of physics, created under the revolution. An anomaly in the Petrograd skyline, Tatlin’s Tower would represent a beacon of constructivist thought and revolutionary action—that is how it would serve the people. Its sight would be a constant reminder that the USSR is able to overcome nature and build something that shouldn’t stand. Tatlin’s tower was so forward-thinking and delusionally ambitious that it remains to this day as just design, and its importance to the Constructivist genre is a testament to its spirit.
Aleksandr Rodchenko, SSSR Na Stroike No. 12 Photo Collages
As a point of contrast, Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photographs and photo collages depicted Promethean ambition through their subject matter, not their form. It is in this subtle difference that Tatlin’s ability to express the core of the revolution’s ideas through art rises above all else. Rodchenko’s Pine Trees, Pushkino (Figure 2) from 1927 is unique in his oeuvre—rarely did the photographer choose nature as his subject matter, as nature was seen to impede the Constructivist goals of organization, order, and industrialism.[14] Using a shift in perspective, Rodchenko was able to transform his subject matter away from traditional aestheticism and into the abstract, constructivist visual language. At first glance, the photograph is jarring—a directly upward view encompasses only a few trees and a flat, monochrome sky. Still, the bark and leaves are secondary to the exaggerated forms created by the extreme viewing angle. As the notion of traditional landscape falls away, the tree shooting upward from the bottom of the composition becomes a long acute triangle, dwarfing the details of the treetops. Rodchenko effectively exploits the nature present in the composition: the inconsistency of the bark and the uneven spacing of the trees are diminished in favor of a monolithic, diagonally oriented triangle. Rodchenko had a great love for the Shukhov Tower, primarily due to its history within the Soviet Union as its first site of public radio transmission, as well as his history as a radio engineer.[15] In his later photographs of Shukhov Tower in 1929 (Figure 3), the tower’s triangular shape gains an inherently constructivist connotation. Using a similar photographic style as he used with Pine Trees, Rodchenko takes a low standing, upward facing angle, creating the exact same elongated acute triangle shape, standing alone amongst the sky. With Pine Trees, Rodchenko transforms nature, considered to be a barrier to the revolution, into a constructivist shape. Nature comes back into perspective a few years later in his photo collages depicting the construction of the White-Sea Canal in the journal SSSR Na Stroike (USSR in Construction) No.12 from 1933.[16]
The motivation of this edition of the journal was just like any other—to spread and create a culture supporting the USSR, the Russian Revolution, and the projects thereafter. The focus of this edition was the White Sea-Baltic Canal, a project meant to improve timber transport for paper mills and construction along the Volga River.[17] With his work in this journal, Rodchenko’s aims are more pragmatic than Tatlin’s monument, but similar in ambition. Whereas in Pine Trees Rodchenko unconventionally employs form to transform nature into industry, here he does it with direct documentation and estrangement of landscape, most visible in the sixth consecutive (Figure 4) photo collage. In this collage, landscape acts as a background, indiscriminate and recognizable only in its condition, devoid of specificity. The horizon line is obscured, and the landscape feels jumbled together—landmarks vanish and the photo collage medium warps the perspective. The landscape is recognizable only as a cold, desolate, and uninhabited space. It does not outline a specific place, but remains merely a condition.
By contrast, the human subjects superimposed onto this winter storm of surroundings are crisp in their figures and clear in their actions. These workers are jackhammering, picking away at rocks, and laying down timber for roads—pathways for technological advancement and indispensable arms of the revolution. They make sense and reason out of this hazy, unnerving landscape. These men are skilled at their job, decisive, and confident in their control of the landscape. Most strikingly, at the center-top of the composition, the mountains that might ordinarily shoot up towards the sky as they do in the eighth image (Figure 5) are replaced by a mark of the revolution, of progress, of dominance over the landscape at any cost—the debris and smoke of two destructive explosions reach as far as the eye can see, replacing the parabolic shape of the mountains of the landscape that they destroy. This debris and smoke reveals Rodchenko’s remarks on Promethean ambition—that man-made soviet construction projects dwarf even the strength and imposition of mountains.
The ambition in Rodchenko’s photos for USSR In Construction is evident. With his photo collage, Rodchenko estranges the viewer from the landscape and any recognition of location, only allowing the viewer to identify the industrialization process. The placing of humans not among the landscape but on top of it suggests the dominance of technology and the ultimate submission of the landscape, most clearly emphasized in the explosions. Further, the photo collage, a medium that is inherently doctored and invented, depicts the canal’s construction by showing a powerful, manufactured human dominance. Rodchenko does away with his use of photography and his sets of snapshots to, as said in his own Against the Synthetic Portrait, For the Snapshot, “paint the truth.”[18] He refuses to merely capture the event, instead deciding to recreate it himself. In much the same way, the collage, like Pine Trees, stresses man’s reforming of nature to fit human needs and desire—yet in Pine Trees, the ambition is much less violent, a preliminary experiment to what is executed in USSR In Construction. If the later photo collage practices the Revolution’s Promethean ambition, Pine Trees is the theory. The difference between Rodchenko’s work surrounding the White Sea Canal and Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International is admittedly very subtle, but nevertheless important when considering art history. Rodchenko’s photographs offer an example of Promethean ambition not in their form, but in their subject matter. Describing the White Sea Canal Project as Promethean makes sense—as Glebova points out, as many as fifty thousand White Sea Canal laborers died in its creation, and its aim was to further the economic prosperity and the spread of resources for the people of the USSR, marking it as both self sacrificing and public serving. Rodchenko’s photos hid the project’s true horrendousness in favor of an image of progress—the photo collages themselves do not bring any new sense of “ambition” to the table. Rodchenko’s skill as an artist serves to depict the construction of the White Sea Canal in a patriotic and successful way, but the photo collage itself does not represent Promethean ambition in artistic form.
Glebova uses the term Promethean ambition to describe the permeating idea throughout Soviet consciousness that nature is something to be overtaken, enemy to the sovereign state, and must be triumphed by humans. The ambition that Glebova describes is evident in Rodchenko’s subject matter, not the art itself. Tatlin’s tower did not have any figurative subject matter to rely on to evoque this sense of ambition, yet the tower still radiates the same feeling.
The term Promethean ambition is a crucial concept in application to the artistic production of the Russian avant-garde. Constructivism was in and of the revolution—it is expected that an idea such as Promethean ambition that is so important to the revolution’s theory would make its way into these artists’ forms. With his Monument to the Third International, Tatlin takes Promethean ambition out of the realm of theory and puts it into, in his own words, “a union of purely artistic forms.”19
Endnotes
[1] Nikolai Punin, “The Monument to the Third International” 1920 in Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993, 337.
[2] Alekseĭ Gan, Constructivism. Translated by Christina Lodder. Barcelona: Editorial Tenov, 2014. 57.
[3] Aglaya Glebova, “Elements of Photography: Avant-garde Aesthetics and the Reforging of Nature.” Representations 1 May 2018; 142 (1): 56–90, Accessed March 28, 2025. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2018.142.1.56.
[4] Christina Lodder, “In Search of 0,10 – The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting: Basel,” The Burlington Magazine 158, no. 1354 (2016): 61–63, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43858631.
[5] John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-garde, Yale University Press, 1983, 151.
[6] Milner, Vladimir Tatlin, 151.
[7] Milner, Vladimir Tatlin, 154.
[8] Punin, “The Monument,” 336.
[9] Punin, “The Monument,” 336.
[10] Punin, “The Monument,” 338.
[11] Jeanne D’Andrea and Stephen West, “The Avant Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives,” The MIT Press, 1980, 255.
[12] Andrea and West, “The Avant Garde,” 255.
[13] Punin, “The Monument,” 338.
[14] Maria Morris Hamburg, “Photography Between the Wars: Selections from the Ford Motor Company Selection,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Volume XLV, Number 4 (1988): 2.
[15] Object file for “Sentry of the Shukhov Tower” in Judith Keller, Alexander Rodchenko: Modern Photography in Soviet Russia (Malibu: The J. Paul Getty Museum 1987), https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/exhibition/103N0Y.
[16] Aleksandr Rodchenko, “SSSR na stroike. Ezhemesiachnyi illiustrirovannyi zhurnal. Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Kanal (USSR in Construction, Monthly Illustrated Journal: The Baltic-White Sea Canal), no. 12,” Journal, photogravure printed with photogravure and lithograph cover, 1933, Museum of Modern Art, In SSSR Na Stroike, Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1933.
[17] Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Against the Synthetic Portrait, For the Snapshot” 1928 in Bowlt, John E. Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934, The Documents of 20th-Century Art, New York: Viking Press, 1976, 250.
[18] Glebova, “Elements of Photography,” 56.
[19] Camilla Gray and Marian Burleigh-Motley, 1986, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922, Rev. and enl. ed. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 225.
About the Author
Clark Louis is a Pitzer College senior from Phoenix, Arizona studying art history at Pomona College, working to organize the gallery talk series at the Pomona College Benton Museum of Art. Clark’s research is focused on his upcoming thesis, centered around contemporary photography of Japanese car culture and its relationship to Soviet photo collage, exploring themes of nostalgia and progress. Outside of art history, Clark studies Japanese Language, and studied abroad in Kyoto, Japan in the Fall of 2024. Aside from his work and study, Clark is passionate about fashion and jazz music.