Created as a prototype for a site-specific, large-scale public sculpture intended to be placed near a Soviet textile factory, Linear Construction was conceived as a tribute to the artists and workers still attempting to construct a socialist society. They moved there shortly before their planned journey to North America, but in September 1939, the passenger ferry the Athena was torpedoed by German submarines - the first such casualty of World War Two - and they were forced to cancel their trip. Tate Papers / Naum Gabo's structurally complex, mesmeric abstract sculptures cast a shadow over the whole of 20 th-century art, while his life was that of the quintessential creative migr, as he moved from country to country seeking new contexts for his work, in flight from war and repression. Kinetic Stone Carving represents a major shift from the Constructivist process of assembling individual elements which Gabo had helped to define earlier in the century. Then, many years later, the discovery that suitable glass was now made by Pilkington's made it practicable for him in 1975 to construct two enlarged versions 194cm high in stainless steel, glass and perspex, including one for the Louisiana Museum at Humlebaek in Denmark. Gabo's influence on modern art has been profound, though it is sometimes underemphasized in art history books. Shortly afterwards, having been offered 25 to make a small construction as a present for a friend, Gabo produced the first version of Spiral Theme, an important work which would take him in a new artistic direction, and lead to a renewed engagement with family and friends. your own Pins on Pinterest Gabo exhibited, alongside many of his compatriates, in the ground-breaking Abstract and Concrete show at London's Lefvre Gallery in 1936, and in 1937 he co-edited the hugely influential compendium of Constructivist art Circle, with Ben Nicholson and the architect Leslie Martin. They were often projects for monumental public schemes, rarely achieved, in which sculpture and architecture came together. Later versions of Kinetic Construction were more complex, incorporating a switch button, and built from more sophisticated materials. They resumed late-night conversations begun in Paris earlier in the decade, on Constructivism, Neo-Plasticism, and the illusionistic space of the painting. Ren Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is a philosophical treatise that was published in 1641. The ultimate winner was the pompous, neo-classical design of architect Boris Iofan. The dynamic arrangement of string-work and Perspex creates three-dimensional light patterns which transform as the viewer moves around the object. The Tate Gallery, in Millbank, London, held a major retrospective of Gabo's work in 1966 and holds many key works in its collection, as do the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York. Gabo was a fluent speaker and writer in German, French, and English in addition to his native Russian. At the same time, the dynamic curves of the design represented a departure from the geometric aesthetics of the "International Style" then prevalent in modernist architecture, which Gabo had studied, and emulated in previous architectural sketches. In 1920, Gabo exhibited in his first show, an outdoor exhibition in a bandstand on the Tverskoy Boulevard in central Moscow, with brother Antoine and Latvian artist and photographer Gustav Klutsis. The birth of a daughter, Nina Serafima, in 1941, also brought him out of a period of creative torpor. Artists such as Alexander Calder, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely, and Bridget Riley all worked in the wake of Gabo's pioneering experiments. Responding to the scientific and political revolutions of his age, Gabo led an eventful and peripatetic life, moving to Berlin, Paris, Oslo, Moscow, London, and finally the United States, and within the circles of the major avant-garde movements of the day, including Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, de Stijl and the Abstraction-Cration group. One of four models made in anticipation of two larger sculptures, Spiral Theme is a curvilinear, transparent construction with a central vertical element, reminiscent of the shells Gabo found on the beaches around St. Ives, his home from 1939 to 1946. After the outbreak of war, Gabo moved first to Copenhagen then Oslo with his older brother Alexei, making his first constructions under the name Naum Gabo in 1915. Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.236-7, reproduced p.236, Celluloid and plastic, 5 5/8 x 3 3/4 x 3 3/4 (14.4 x 9.4 x 9.4), , Tate Gallery, November 1976-January 1977 (17, repr. Naum Gabo, ein russischer Konstruktivist in Berlin 1922-1932: Skulpturen, Zeichnungen und Architekturentwrfe, Dokumente und Archive aus der Sammlung der Berlinischen Galerie, ed. 2 is a figurative bust, one of four similar works that characterize Gabo's early career, created during his period of refuge in Norway during World War One. Lost in the Detail: Naum Gabo's Monoprints. His maquettes for that project, and the earliest version of Linear Construction 2, date from 1949; the version in the Tate Collection was specially constructed and donated by the artist in 1969, in memory of his friend Herbert Read (it was rebuilt in 1971). The central abstract form completes a full rotation every 10 minutes, as plumes of water emerge with varying pressure from 140 holes on the steel wings of the fountain, assuming the form of curved planes. 24 July]1890 23 August 1977) (Hebrew: ), was an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and the subsequent development of twentieth-century sculpture. But this piece has its origins in the heady post-revolutionary atmosphere of early 1920s Moscow, where sculptors were attempting to apply the abstract visual vocabulary of the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich to three-dimensional art. His proposal that Monument for an Airport could be used to advertise Imperial Airways, as either a desk display or an outdoor sculpture, was never realised. Kinetic Stone Carving is one of Gabo's more anomalous and beautiful works, which would probably not have been created without the creative stimulus of his friendship with British abstract sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth during the late 1930s and 1940s. These include Constructie, an 81-foot commemorative monument in front of the Bijenkorf Department Store (1954, unveiled in 1957) in Rotterdam, and Revolving Torsion, a large fountain outside St Thomas Hospital in London. As a student of engineering and architecture, he emulated and demonstrated cutting-edge techniques from those fields in his sculptural constructions, and designed complex architectural plans himself. Ultimately, construction on the Palace of the Soviets was aborted by the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and never resumed. His sculptures initiate a connection between what is tangible and intangible, between what is simplistic in its reality and the unlimited possibilities of intuitive imagination. The Tate Gallery, London held a major retrospective of Gabo's work in 1966 and holds many key works in its collection, as do the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York. It manifests the spiritual rhythm and directs it. His ingenious extension of Cubist painting techniques into the realm of sculpture predicated much abstract sculpture of the following decades. He devised systems of construction which were not only used for his elegantly elaborate sculptures but were viable for architecture as well. "Naum Gabo Artist Overview and Analysis". Gabo contributed to the Agit-prop open air exhibitions and taught at 'VKhUTEMAS' the Higher Art and Technical Workshop, with Tatlin, Kandinsky and Rodchenko. All Rights Reserved, Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews Paperback - April, 2002, Constructing Modernity: The Art & Career of Naum Gabo, Naum Gabo: The constructive idea; sculpture, drawings, paintings, monoprint, 'Absolute' Art Discussed Here by Naum Gabo, Naum Gabo and the Quandaries of the Replica, TateShots: Interview with the artist Naum Gabo's daughter, Naum Gabo & Antoine Pevsner - The Realistic Manifesto (Manifesto Extract, 1920), Transcript of interview of Naum Gabo by Gunnar Jespersen, Gabo believed that art should have an explicit and functional value in society. 2 is known to have been one of Gabo's favorite works, and it signals arguably the final significant creative shift of Gabo's career, taking him towards the large, public works of the 1950s-70s. But while his artist comrade Vladimir Tatlin created raw, crudely assembled reliefs, Gabo's works were delicate and precise; at the same time, they had a distinct mechanical aesthetic, indicating his enduring fascination with science and engineering. Constructed Head No. In a sense, his approach to the project had developed out his earlier interest, as a sculptor, in the difference between mass and volume: how a space could be articulated without being filled with solid elements. Gabo elaborated many of his ideas in the Constructivist Realistic Manifesto, which he issued with his brother, sculptor Antoine Pevsner as a handbill accompanying their 1920 open-air exhibition in Moscow. ", "Sculpture personifies and inspires the ideas of all great epochs. The critic Herbert Read hailed it as 'the highest point ever reached by the aesthetic intuition of man'. [2][3] Two preoccupations, unique to Gabo, were his interest in representing negative space"released from any closed volume" or massand time. In the manifesto Gabo criticized Cubism and Futurism as not becoming fully abstract arts and stated that the spiritual experience was the root of artistic production. Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors, Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Greg Thomas, Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (1920), Submitted Design for Palace of Soviets: Plan of Main Hall and Section (1931), Linear Construction in Space No. By incorporating moving parts into his sculpture, or static elements which strongly suggested movement, Gabo's work stands at the forefront of a whole artistic tradition, Kinetic Art, which uses art to represent time as well as space. The appearance of the busts shifts and modulates constantly, based on viewing angle, lighting, and other ambient factors. Despite severe economic hardship, Gabo threw himself into the cause over the next five years, later recalling that "at the beginning we were all working for the Government". Moscow was caught up in a tumultuous mix of revolutionary fervor and the strife of civil war. In a highly memorable and traumatic encounter, he witnessed the brutality of the Cossacks against a protester, later recalling: "I was 15 years old and that day and that night I became a revolutionary". [Internet]. Gabo was born Naum Pevsner in the small Russian town of Bryansk, the sixth of seven brothers and sisters. Caroline Collier, an authority on Gabos work, said, "The real stuff of Gabos art is not his physical materials, but his perception of space, time and movement. Wassily Kandinsky's revelatory book on abstract art, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), was gaining currency at this time, and fomented Gabo's interest in representing the structures and forces of nature. 2 grew from Gabo's unrealized plans for two public sculptures to stand outside the new Esso Building at the Rockefeller Center in New York. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. The sculpture was eventually installed as a fountain centre-piece for St. Thomas's Hospital, London in 1975, and in 1976 was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II during the hospital's official opening. Gabo also began attending the art-history lectures of an influential tutor, Heinrich Wlfflin. His command of several languages contributed greatly to his mobility during his career. Gabo wrote and issued jointly with Antoine Pevsner in August 1920 a "Realistic Manifesto" proclaiming the tenets of pure Constructivism the first time that the term was used. Indeed, his. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. Constructed Head No. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. [8], Gabo pioneered the use of plastics, such as cellulose acetate, in his sculptures. This meant he could incorporate empty spaces into his sculptures. Gabo and Pevsner distributed 5000 copies on the streets of Moscow, calling for a new art for the people, a "new Great Style" which would capture the spirit of an "unfolding epoch of human history". The Pevsners were a large, tightknit, patriarchal middle-class family, with a strong and charismatic father, Boris, and mother, Fanny. In it, he sought to move past Cubism and Futurism, renouncing what he saw as the static, decorative use of color, line, volume and solid mass in favor of a new element he called "the kinetic rhythms () the basic forms of our perception of real time." 2 2022-10-21. These earliest constructions originally in cardboard or wood were figurative such as the Head No.2 in the Tate collection. Cellulose, acetate and Perspex - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. In fact, the element of movement in Gabos sculpture is connected to a strong rhythm, more implicit and deeper than the chaotic patterns of life itself. Due to the dearth of exhibitions and sales in war-time Britain, Gabo's time in England was not commercially successful, though he always looked back on it fondly. Since the 1950s, Gabo had been reworking many of his sculptural designs as public installations - including a 25-metre sculpture for the Bijenkorf Department Store in Rotterdam, completed in 1957 - and this activity gathered pace towards the end of his life. Linear Construction in Space No. He was part of the St Ives group in Cornwall, alongside Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. He made his first geometrical constructions while living in Oslo in 1915. Whereas the Tate's model has a red base, the bases of the others are either black or (in the case of Nina Gabo's version) stainless steel. de la Croix, Horst and Richard G. Tansey, Gabo, Naum. He made his first geometrical constructions while living in Oslo in 1915. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet. Expressing a new, intellectually scrupulous approach to the fascination with movement which characterized avant-garde art of this period, Gabo created a work which stands at the forefront of Kinetic Art. Though he was to live in self-imposed exile in Europe and America for most of his adult life, he always lamented his distance from Russia, where he claimed his "consciousness was moulded". Moving away from the geometrical precision typical of 1920s modernist architecture - the work of Le Corbusier, for example - Gabo's work predicts later developments in the style, such as the curvilinear forms of Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer's designs for Braslia in the 1950s. 'From the very beginning of the Constructive Movement it was clear to me that a constructed, , Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.236-7, reproduced p.236, Model for Construction in Space Two Cones, Model for Construction in Space Crystal. We would like to hear from you. This was an adventurous approach to the concept of load-bearing in architecture, a job that would generally be performed by distinct components such as beams or ribs. During 1912-13, Gabo made his first trips to Paris with his brother Antoine, to whom he was very close. Nature / Meeting Trotsky on more than one occasion, during the early 1920s Gabo worked for the new Department of Fine Arts (IZO), dominated by abstracts artists at this time, which led him to work on a new art education program for schools, and on the single issue of the department Journal, Izo. Gabo made preliminary designs for Column in 1921 with the idea of making it into a large public sculpture, towering over the hills near Moscow. It was by this means that the young Naum became familiar with many of the industrial materials that would later inspire his work, while two of his older brothers pursued careers in engineering. Naum Gabo, born Naum Neemia Pevsner (5 August[O.S. Gabo sent a maquette to London, where Reid located a sponsor to fund the construction of the final piece and find a suitable location. His older brother was fellow Constructivist artist Antoine Pevsner; Gabo changed his name to avoid confusion with him. Born in Russia, he had lived in Germany, Norway, France and then from 1936 to 1946 in England. Gabo began printmaking in 1950, when he was persuaded to try out the medium by William Ivins, a former curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gabo's designs had become increasingly monumental but there was little opportunity to apply them; as he commented, "It was the height of civil war, hunger and disorder in Russia. ", "I have chosen the absoluteness and exactitude of my lines, shapes and forms, in the conviction they are the most immediate medium for my communication to others of the rhythms and states of mind I would wish the world to be in. During this period he realised a design for a fountain in Dresden (since destroyed). He famously explored the former idea in his Linear Construction works (1942-1971)used nylon filament to create voids or interior spaces as "concrete" as the elements of solid massand the latter in his pioneering work, Kinetic Sculpture (Standing Waves) (1920), often considered the first kinetic work of art. Two preoccupations, unique to Gabo, were his interest in representing negative space"released from any closed volume" or massand time. Mondrian was penniless when he arrived in London in 1938, and while Hepworth and Nicholson found him accommodation in Hampstead, Gabo supplied his companion from Abstraction-Cration with clothes, furniture, and food. Away from war-torn Europe, Gabo found artistic freedom and financial security. Five thousand copies of the manifesto tract were displayed in Moscow streets in 1920. St. Ives, Cornwall had been home to a large community of artists since the 1920s, including Bernard Leach, Adrian Stokes, and the fisherman and artistic savant Alfred Wallis. Constructed Head No. During his travels to Paris in 1912-13, Gabo had seen Picasso and Braque's paintings - the artists were still in their so-called Analytical Cubis" phase - and in Norway he began to apply similar concepts of breaking up the picture plane into three-dimensional work - consider Picasso's Woman with Pears (1909), for example. One of Gabo's most important discoveries was that empty space could be used as an element of sculpture. The use of industrial materials like metal and glass in works like Column was a way of emulating mechanical and architectural processes, as was the angular precision of the design. Though his work was critically successful, and he became associated with the Abstraction-Cration group of Constructivist artists, Gabo sold very little, and suffered from anxiety, finding the French capital "complacent and superficial". Gabo's increasing concern, from the late 1930s, with the aesthetic aspect of his work at the expense of the industrial can be seen in Model for 'Construction in Space "Crystal"'. It is abstract, geometric, and created with industrial design methods. From an early age, Naum was strong-minded, rebellious, and politically driven. Gabos acute awareness of turmoil sought out solace in the peacefulness that was so fully realized in his ideal art forms. Exh: It is one of a number of works created during the early 1920s which demonstrate Gabo's departure from the early, figurative style of the Constructed Heads, and his movement towards a more pure abstraction. ', Published in: By the time he reached England in 1936 Gabo was an internationally recognized artist, and he was welcomed warmly by British artists and critics such as Barbara Hepworth, her future husband Ben Nicholson, and Herbert Read, many of whom Gabo had met in Paris through Abstraction-Cration. Lit: Column is a representative piece of constructivist sculpture. At the outbreak of World War II he followed his friends Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson to St Ives in Cornwall, where he stayed initially with the art critic Adrian Stokes and his wife Margaret Mellis. It should be noticed that the work was conceived in the winter of 1920-1, as a tiny model, and executed in the winter of 1922-3 in its big form'. It was in Munich that Gabo attended the lectures of art historian Heinrich Wlfflin and gained knowledge of the ideas of Einstein and his fellow innovators of scientific theory, as well as the philosopher Henri Bergson. He would later remark that "if anyone made me a Jew, it was Hitler". Kinetic Construction was devised partly to demonstrate the aesthetic concepts proclaimed in Gabo and Pevsner's Realistic Manifesto. In 1950, Gabo began wood-block printing, an activity which would occupy him until his death, generating a significant body of work. Imaginative as Gabo was, his practicality lent itself to the conception and production of his works. For Gabo, sculptures like Column, which gave a certain impression of weightlessness, "appeal[ed] to minds and feelings more than crude physical senses". To find any part of machinery was next to impossible". His use of empty space as a substantive element of sculpture is echoed in later works by British artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. At the same time, Gabo's interest in transparent materials like glass and plastic - which was profound and enduring from this period onwards - reflected his ongoing fascination with depicting volume independently of mass.
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