ABSTRACT
There are certain works of art—even certain artistic conceptions—which assume a historical importance far in excess of their workaday merits. Such works become imbued with an aura of myth. One of these works is Vladimir Tatlin's Monument for the Third International. More than any other single work, it symbolizes the ideals of the Russian avant-garde in the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution. It represents a high point in that exhilarating union of radical aesthetics and revolutionary politics which dominated Russian cultural life in the first five years of the Bolshevik regime. Tatlin was, both a leader of the modernist movement and a renegade from its purist objectives. He was the classic example of the modernist who found "mere" art insufficient for his goals. All of life had to be assimilated to his grand design, and the combined force of modern technology and modern politics promised, for a time, to make this impossible ideal a workable reality.
