Ukrainian painter, designer, sculptor and teacher, active mainly in Russia.The son of a railway engineer and a poet, he attended school in Kharkiv and trained as a merchant sea cadet, visiting Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, Asia Minor, Africa, Greece and Italy. He began his painting career as an icon painter in Moscow, but he subsequently attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1902–3), studying under Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov, before moving to the Penza School of Art (1904–10), where his tutors were Ivan Goryushkin-Sorokopudov (1873–1954) and Aleksey Afanas’ev (1850–1920). During the summer months he made copies of Russian church frescoes. This awareness of traditional painting techniques complemented the adventurous and Westernized art of his Moscow tutors Korovin and Serov. Between 1908 and 1911 he also became friendly with the Burlyuk brothers and Mikhail Larionov, who were instrumental in the evolution of Russian Futurism, the iconoclastic, absurdist, visionary development in Russian art and letters that arose independently of Italian Futurism. Introduced to the most adventurous exhibition groups and salons, including the World of Art and the Golden Fleece, Tatlin learnt rapidly about recent developments in Western European art. He also had access to the collections in Moscow of Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, whose acquisitions of works by Monet, Gauguin, Cézanne and the Nabis were complemented with recent paintings by Picasso and Matisse. The newest exhibition groups seized upon recent European developments from Paris and Munich, while simultaneously debating the independence of Russian cultural traditions of folk art and icon painting. Tatlin exhibited with many of the avant-garde groups, including the Jack of Diamonds, the Union of Youth and the DONKEY’S TAIL group, which was aggressively Russian in outlook and was inspired by non-Western, primitivist art, folk art and icon painting. Tatlin’s works employed compass and ruler to construct an unconventional picture space. Between 1911 and 1915 Tatlin worked in Moscow alongside the painters Aleksandr Vesnin, Nadezhda Udal’tsova, Lyubov’ Popova, Valentina Khodasevich (1894–1968) and Robert Fal’k, all of whom responded to the Cubist and Futurist ideas debated and published in the journal Soyuz Molodyozhi of the Union of Youth, with whom Tatlin was exhibiting in 1913. Tatlin was the first illustrator, at this time, of the key Russian Futurist poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh (Mirskontsa, ‘The world backwards’; Moscow, 1912) and of the revolutionary painter-poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (Trebnik troikh, ‘The missal of the three’, 1913). In addition he had begun to work on stage designs, some of which he exhibited in 1912 at an exhibition at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture along with his paintings The Fishmonger (1911; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.) and Sailor.