After the revolution of 1917, part of the artistic community in Russia chose not to depict the new order but to produce its instruments. The Monument to the Third International — Tatlin's Tower — whose model Vladimir Tatlin exhibited in 1920, is the manifesto of that position. It was designed as a steel structure half again the height of the Eiffel Tower, rising in two spirals around a tilted axis. Inside it, four glass volumes would rotate at different speeds: a legislature turning once a year, an executive once a month, an information centre once a day.

The building was never constructed; the country did not have that much steel and the engineering exceeded what the period could do. But the idea travelled: an artwork was no longer a surface but a working system. Rodchenko, Stepanova, Popova and Lissitzky left the canvas for posters, book covers, textile patterns, furniture and exhibition design; the programme of 'production art' called on the artist to work with the factory.

Constructivism's visual language — diagonal composition, photomontage, red-and-black typography, materials left exposed — passed westward through the Bauhaus and founded modern graphic design. In the Soviet Union it was liquidated in the 1930s when socialist realism was declared the official style; Tatlin spent his last years working on a human-powered flying machine, Letatlin. The tower survives only in its models and photographs — the most reproduced unbuilt structure in the history of art.