Flying Machine

Tretyakov Restores the Letatlin

The Tretyakov Gallery has completed restoration of a defining artwork of the Russian avant-garde: the ornithopter, or flying machine, created by Vladimir Tatlin in 1932. He christened his work the Letatlin (based on the word letat, “to fly,” and his last name).

Tatlin is considered by many to be the father of Constructivism (see article, page 56), and he took art out of its two-dimensional format (and out of its frames) with a series of works he called counter-reliefs. Letatlin was one of his last works, produced in the final days of the revolutionary art era, just before the movement was squashed by Soviet censorship and Socialist Realism in the 1930s.

Tatlin made the Letatlin as a practical object, a one-person flying apparatus, and hoped that industrial production would make it as common as bicycles in the Soviet Union. Made of wood, leather, whalebone, and fabric, with custom-made bearings, it embodies the dream of flight and the avant-garde idea of freedom. The Tretyakov said that their restoration did not replace any of the original elements, that the piece is intact, just as it was after the previous restoration in the 1960s.

Several Letatlins were constructed, but only one has survived to the present: the Letatlin #3, which has one skeletal wing exposed, without its parachute-silk skin, in order to show its design. But Tatlin was never able to test his creation, and when he died the Letatlin #3 was moved to the Central House of Aviation. It later ended up in the Defense Ministry’s neglected aviation museum in Monino, outside Moscow. The museum did not have money to stave off Letatlin’s disintegration, and by the time the Tretyakov began its restoration work, it was in a sorry state.

“Its condition was very problematic and very serious,” said Tretyakov Gallery Director Zelfira Tregulova, calling the restoration miraculous, as if the device had “risen out of the ashes, like a Phoenix.”

While the Russian avant-garde is popular around the world, and many museums offered retrospectives last year to mark the October Revolution, few original works by Tatlin have survived. And, since the real Letatlin has for decades been too fragile to transport, let alone be sent on loan to foreign museums, “instead what they [foreign museums] have done is make ugly and monstrous copies,” Tregulova said.

The artwork (pictured, above) is now exhibited in a hall of the gallery’s Krymsky Val building, which contains twentieth-century art, and where several of Tatlin’s counter-reliefs are on permanent display.

Meanwhile, internationally acclaimed avant-garde art is not particularly popular in Russia, though Tregulova said this started to change following the Sochi Winter Olympic Games, which highlighted the era’s art as a uniquely Russian achievement. Since then, Tregulova said, the Tretyakov has seen “more visitors who come to see permanent collections of the avant-garde, social realism and non-conformist art.” She said she hopes that Letatlin will make the trend permanent, by providing “a new format for exposure to the avant-garde.”