1 (1942-43), Linear Construction in Space No. 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. 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. By using nylon, a new, synthetic material whose elasticity, smoothness and translucency defined the feel of this sculpture, Gabo again demonstrated his engagement his interest in using new, man-made compositional materials. Again, this sculpture represents a creative departure from Gabo's previous work. Gabo had lived through a revolution and two world wars; he was also Jewish and had fled Nazi Germany. This move gave Naum the excuse he had craved to abandon his studies and concentrate on his art. Subtitled International Survey of Constructivist Art, Circle featured important critical statements as well as reproductions of key artworks, and reflected a cultural optimism that the impending conflict in Europe had yet to diminish. Gabo was associated briefly with the Bauhaus School - then the hub of European Constructivism - lecturing and writing for their journal. Spiral Theme was created at a time when Gabo was deeply concerned about the threat of German invasion of the UK, and the fate of his family in Russia, which had already been invaded by Germany in June 1941. Naum Gabo Naum Neemia Pevsner Born: August 5, 1890; Bryansk, Russian Federation Died: August 23, 1977; Waterbury, Connecticut, United States Nationality: Russian, Jewish Art Movement: Constructivism, Kinetic art Painting School: Abstraction-Cration, St Ives School Genre: sculpture Field: painting, sculpture Though Boris was Jewish, the siblings were brought up Christian through the influence of their Russian Orthodox grandmother, and Naum would distance himself from his Jewish roots for much of his life. Gabo also became alienated quite quickly from the St. Ives School, shutting himself away in his studio for days, and arguing with Nicholson and Hepworth after he accused the latter of stealing his ideas. The work is composed of six meditations, in which Descartes attempts to establish a firm Naum gabo artwork Rating: 4,3/10 1459 reviews. While in Cornwall he continued to work, albeit on a smaller scale. Herbert Read and Leslie Martin, Gabo: Constructions, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Engravings Ren Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is a philosophical treatise that was published in 1641. Gabo sent a maquette to London, where Reid located a sponsor to fund the construction of the final piece and find a suitable location. ", "Sculpture personifies and inspires the ideas of all great epochs. Sep 22, 2013 - This Pin was discovered by Sesit. base: 0.3 cm (1/8 in.) In 1952, despite finishing ahead of 3,500 other artists, he was disappointed to be awarded second prize in the Institute of Contemporary Art's Unknown Political Prisoner international sculpture competition, his abstract monument design having been perceived to lack emotion. [2][3][5] After working on a smaller scale in England during the war years (1936-1946), Gabo moved to the United States, where he received several public sculpture commissions, only some of which he completed. It manifests the spiritual rhythm and directs it. Described by siblings as a "mischievous and daredevil character", he soon looked for radical ways of expressing himself. Constructing his sculptures from sets of interlocking components rather than carving or moulding them from inert mass allowed him to incorporate space into his work more easily. In 1912 Gabo transferred to an engineering school in Munich where he discovered abstract art and met Wassily Kandinsky and in 1913-14 joined his brother Antoine (who by then was an established painter) in Paris. Visit the Frank Lloyd Wrightdesigned Guggenheim Museum in NYC, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He was part of the St Ives group in Cornwall, alongside Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. 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. His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works This document, written by Gabo, made history, galvanizing the spirit of rebellion and the urgent desire for change amongst a huge swath of Russian culture at this time. The larger versions of Spiral Theme arose from Gabo's discovery, in 1935, of a new compositional material, Perspex, which had increased flexibility when heated, and was more transparent than the celluloid he had used in earlier works. Moreover, in rejecting the notion of sculpture as weighty, monolithic and solid, and in emphasizing that space is no less tangible than solid matter, this delicate construction predicts a number of elementary paradigms in modern sculpture more generally. Boris Pevsner owned a successful metal works and rolling mill, which supplied many of the railways around Russia. The Work of Naum Gabo Nina & Graham Williams / Tate, London 2023. Gabo worked through various movements and ideas, eventually settling in the United States after the Second World War. Like lots of Gabo's later, large-scale public works, Revolving Torsion is the final realization of a theme previously expressed across a range of scales and materials, in this case as various plastic and metal models created from the late 1920s onwards: Model for Torsion (circa 1928), Torsion: Project for a Fountain (1960-64), etcetera. 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. During the 1960s-70s, a shift in public and critical opinion led to a newfound enthusiasm for large-scale, abstract sculpture, and these final decades of Gabo's life brought him unprecedented success, including a slew of international exhibitions, and notable retrospectives at London's Tate Gallery in 1966 and 1976. After making the large version, Gabo also made three models in plastic about 25.4cm high which belong to Sir Leslie Martin, Cambridge, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and Nina S. Gabo, London. Ultimately, construction on the Palace of the Soviets was aborted by the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and never resumed. My works of this time, up to 1924 , are all in the search for an image which would fuse the sculptural element with the architectural element into one unit. In 1976, Gabo's Revolving Torsion sculpture was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II at the opening of St Thomas's Hospital in Central London. Gabo also began attending the art-history lectures of an influential tutor, Heinrich Wlfflin. Lit: Gabo had been in regular correspondence with Alfred H. Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, later resulting in unrealized plans for a major exhibition of Gabo's work, and Gabo planned to resettle in the USA. Naum gabo artwork Rating: 4,3/10 1459 reviews. Naum Gabo Column 1921 - 1922/75 The Work of Naum Gabo Nina and Graham Williams Biography Born 1890 Died 1977 Nationalities Russian American Birth place Klimovichi Death place Waterbury Gabo was born in Russia and trained in Munich as a scientist and engineer. He was also finally able to achieve a long-held ambition of creating large-scale, public works, receiving commissions from the Rockefeller Centre in New York in 1949, and the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1950 - though only the latter construction was realized, a hanging sculpture inspired by Alexander Calder (with whom Gabo would exhibit in 1953 at the Wadsworth Athaeneum) and Rodchenko. After the Soviet Union withdrew from World War I in 1917 and the threat of a draft was over, Pevsner and his brother, sculptor Naum Gabo, returned to Moscow to participate in the utopian fervor of building a new egalitarian society. Naum Gabo, born Naum Neemia Pevsner (5 August[O.S. 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". Characteristically, though, he disagreed with some of their functionalist principles. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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. Later versions of Kinetic Construction were more complex, incorporating a switch button, and built from more sophisticated materials. Plastic and nylon threads - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. The Palace of the Soviets, according to the brief, was to consist of two auditoria holding 20,000 people in total, and would serve as a venue for mass meetings, demonstrations, and cultural events. 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. The same year he was introduced to Miriam Israels, who he would marry in 1937, with Nicholson and Hepworth as witnesses. Expelled from his primary school in 1904 for writing subversive poems about his headmaster, he was sent to Tomsk, where he inadvertently attended his first socialist meeting during the 1905 revolution. By working with the technical precision of an engineer or architect, and by illustrating new scientific concepts, Gabo predicted the functionalist aesthetic of the nascent Constructivist movement - the work of Alexander Rodchenko and others - and of Concrete Art, Kinetic Art, and other post-Constructivist movements of the mid-to-late-20th century. The ultimate winner was the pompous, neo-classical design of architect Boris Iofan. [1] 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.[4][5]. For Gabo, sculptures like Column, which gave a certain impression of weightlessness, "appeal[ed] to minds and feelings more than crude physical senses". Less publicly, he derided Tatlin for "playing around with engineering forms and materials". Gabo's health began to fail in his 80s, and he died in 1977 in Waterbury, Connecticut, following a long illness. Gabo grew up in a Jewish family of six children in the provincial Russian town of Bryansk, where his father Boris (Berko) Pevsner worked as an engineer. Gabo contributed to the Agit-prop open air exhibitions and taught at 'VKhUTEMAS' the Higher Art and Technical Workshop, with Tatlin, Kandinsky and Rodchenko. de la Croix, Horst and Richard G. Tansey, Gabo, Naum. Not inscribed [Internet]. Visit the Frank Lloyd Wrightdesigned Guggenheim Museum in NYC, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Norway was quiet and tranquil. With the four versions of Spiral Theme Gabo discovered a new aspect of his creative register, the pieces' graceful, organic forms supplanting the geometric planes and precision of works such as Column, and perhaps reflecting his new creative friendships with artists like Barbara Hepworth. At the same time, he was moved by works that looked back to indigenous Russian artistic traditions, experimenting with romantic and expressive watercolors that drew heavily on the paintings of Mikhail Vrubel. 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. He lacked confidence in his art, and there were tensions and jealousy between him and his brother. The fact that it was intended as a model for a building exemplifies the Constructivist concern with giving art a functional purpose. Artwork page for Spiral Theme, Naum Gabo, 1941 When Spiral Theme was shown in wartime London, it was greeted with popular acclaim. During 1912-13, Gabo made his first trips to Paris with his brother Antoine, to whom he was very close. They were often projects for monumental public schemes, rarely achieved, in which sculpture and architecture came together. Gabo had underplayed his Jewish identity for most of his life, resisting categorisation as an artist by his ethnicity, but now, horrified by the rise of the Nazis, he became newly aware of his heritage. Artist: Naum Gabo, American, born Russia, 18901977 Model of the Column (formerly Model for Glass Fountain) ca. The mid-1930s was an important period for British Constructivism, and Gabo and his associates wanted the world to know that the avant-garde had shifted from its Parisian base. 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. Naum gabo artwork. Two years later, he defied his father's wishes by transferring to study maths, natural and applied sciences, engineering, and, finally, philosophy. As a young man in post-Revolutionary Russia, Gabo was closely associated with Constructivism, which sought to blur the boundaries between creative and functional processes. 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. Hammer, Martin and Naum Gabo, Christina Lodder. Travelling back from Siberia to Bryansk on the two-day train journey, he claimed he "had awoken to life", and within a year he was working for an illegal group distributing literature for the Social Democratic Labour Party amongst workers. His older brother was fellow Constructivist artist Antoine Pevsner; Gabo changed his name to avoid confusion with him. One of Gabo's most important discoveries was that empty space could be used as an element of sculpture. Indeed, he felt that the combination of his Russian roots and his recent experience with Western architectural and scientific principles would stand him in good stead in the competition. But when set in motion by an electric motor, the oscillations of the rod generate a delicately complex image of a freestanding, twisting wave. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. Miriam had been married to a businessman, Cyril Franklin, with whom she had three children, but she ended her marriage shortly after meeting Gabo. The appearance of the busts shifts and modulates constantly, based on viewing angle, lighting, and other ambient factors. A larger version was created for the exhibition New Movements in Art: Contemporary Work in England, held at the London Museum in Spring 1942. After the Soviet Union withdrew from World War I in 1917 and the threat of a draft was over, Pevsner and his brother, sculptor Naum Gabo, returned to Moscow to participate in the utopian fervor of building a new egalitarian society. "Sculpture: Carving and construction in space,", The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Mr and Mrs Frank G. Logan Art Institute Prize. With the onset of World War I, Gabo and his younger brother Alexei, also based in Germany, fled via Copenhagen to neutral Norway, partly to avoid serving in the Imperial Army, and partly because, as Russian nationals, they were suddenly pariahs in their new home. Gabo had also begun after his arrival in England to experiment with new materials such as Perspex and stone, influenced by the Direct Carving of Moore and Hepworth, though materials were increasingly hard to source, and sales were poor. your own Pins on Pinterest 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"'. 2022-10-21. 2 2022-10-21. '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. A sojourn in Paris from 1911 to 1914 introduced him to cubism and futurism, two radical new approaches to making art. Tate Papers / 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. Stainless steel - St Thomas's Hospital, London. "Naum Gabo Artist Overview and Analysis". 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. They have commissioned replicas of some sculptures to preserve a visual record of their appearances.[9]. 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. Nature / From an early age, Naum was strong-minded, rebellious, and politically driven. Nonetheless, Gabo began a creative diary during this period, and involved himself in a diverse range of projects, including creating plans for domestic interiors, and even designing a car for the Jowett company in 1944 - though this plan fell through, with Jowett calling Gabo's concepts "radical but impractical". A sojourn in Paris from 1911 to 1914 introduced him to cubism and futurism, two radical new approaches to making art. Gabo visited London in 1935, and settled in 1936, where he found a "spirit of optimism and sympathy for his position as an abstract artist". This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). At the same time, he was working on a series of increasingly abstract sculptural constructions. 'I consider this Column the culmination of that search. We would like to hear from you. In 1912 Gabo transferred to an engineering school in Munich where he discovered abstract art and met Wassily Kandinsky and in 1913-14 joined his brother Antoine (who by then was an established painter) in Paris. 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. (London 1957), note between pls.25 and 26, and p.183. Naum Gabo, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 1999. Gabo's other concern as described in the Realistic Manifesto was that art needed to exist actively in four dimensions including time. The use of space in the work, in this case the central void enclosed by the surrounding Perspex, becomes a newly prominent feature. Naum Gabo Naum Neemia Pevsner Born: August 5, 1890; Bryansk, Russian Federation Died: August 23, 1977; Waterbury, Connecticut, United States Nationality: Russian, Jewish Art Movement: Constructivism, Kinetic art Painting School: Abstraction-Cration, St Ives School Genre: sculpture Field: painting, sculpture In 1932, Gabo fled the "unbreathable" atmosphere of Germany for Paris, where he would remain for four years. The model, like the later piece, is made of glass, plastic, and metal. Constructed from flat planes of intersecting plywood this Madonna-like figure alludes to the icon paintings that Gabo would have seen in Russian Orthodox domestic interiors, traditionally placed high up in the corner of the room, as if watching over the inhabitants below. 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. He then moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, USA. An illusion of movement is created as the smooth, wave-like shapes seem to advance and recede. About this artwork. ", "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. 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. In retrospect, works like Column set the tone for aspects of Gabo's work throughout the rest of his career. In the 1960s a project for enlarging Column had floundered in part, precisely because of his desire to ensure aesthetic quality.21 In 1971, however, Gabo had enough faith in Knud Jensen, director of the Louisiana Museum, to allow him to oversee the construction of a pair of large Columns in Denmark, using Gabos model, his specifications, and incorporating transparent 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". It is abstract, geometric, and created with industrial design methods. 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. [7] His earliest constructions such as Head No.2 were formal experiments in depicting the volume of a figure without carrying its mass. Away from war-torn Europe, Gabo found artistic freedom and financial security. Autumn 2007. cit., Gabo declared: 'From the very beginning of the Constructive Movement it was clear to me that a constructed sculpture, by its very method and technique, brings sculpture very near to architecture. 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. Set within the Perspex planes are opaquely colored, geometric floating shapes, and an open ring. Naum Gabo, ein russischer Konstruktivist in Berlin 1922-1932: Skulpturen, Zeichnungen und Architekturentwrfe, Dokumente und Archive aus der Sammlung der Berlinischen Galerie, ed. Though not a part of this group, and opposed to aspects of their utilitarian aesthetic, Gabo was breathing the same creative air, and like the Working Group artists, was inspired by the demonstration of modern engineering principles in Vladimir Tatlin's majestic Model for a Monument to the Third International (1920). Gabo died in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1977. Gabo also devised plans for architectural forms, such as skyscrapers and car-parks, which were never realized. 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. Lost in the Detail: Naum Gabo's Monoprints. Celluloid and plastic, 5 5/8 x 3 3/4 x 3 3/4 (14.4 x 9.4 x 9.4) This piece also represents the first time Gabo used string in his work, inspired by geometrical modelling techniques and by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore's sculptures, though Gabo applied this compositional material in a new way. 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. 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. Column is a representative piece of constructivist sculpture. Vassar Miscellany News / Gabo was offered the studio behind Peter Lanyon's red house whilst the younger artist was away fighting. Lost in the Detail: Naum Gabo's Monoprints. By the early 1930s, the political climate in Germany had grown increasingly nationalistic, anti-semitic, and toxic. This group idealized the principles of engineering and architecture, and wanted art to have a similarly functional purpose. Discover (and save!) 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. your own Pins on Pinterest The auditoria would be hollow, curvilinear, shell-like forms, absorbing stress evenly across their entire surfaces. [8], Gabo pioneered the use of plastics, such as cellulose acetate, in his sculptures. It is a sign of how much Russia had changed since Gabo's departure nine years previously that neither his proposal nor those of the other modernist architects who had entered were rewarded by the judges. .1927-9. Inspired by his war-time associates Moore and Hepworth, Gabo wanted to see if he could generate the sense of kinetic rhythm which his work relied on whilst utilizing a more conventional approach to sculpture. T02167 is presumably the tiny model referred to. 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. 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. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet. During this period the reliefs and construction became more geometric and Gabo began to experiment with kinetic sculpture though the majority of the work was lost or destroyed. In 1913, at Wlflinn's suggestion, Gabo embarked on a six-week walking tour of Italy, viewing Michelangelo's David and other Renaissance and classical masterpieces. Recalling the creation of the sculpture in impoverished, war-torn Moscow, where most of the factories were shut, Gabo stated that he visited the mechanical workshop of the Polytechnicum Museum, where he requisitioned an old electric door bell whose internal electromagnet became the mechanical component of the piece. Naum Gabo Model for Column 19201 The Work of Naum Gabo Nina & Graham Williams / Tate, London 2023 License this image Not on display Artist Naum Gabo 18901977 Medium Plastic (cellulose nitrate) Dimensions Object: 143 95 95 mm Collection Tate Acquisition Presented by the artist 1977 Reference T02167 Display caption Catalogue entry 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. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. Gabo's proposal was his first attempt at a fully realized architectural plan, and was a logical extrapolation of the aesthetics and techniques of his earlier, abstract sculptural works. Despite this, the European art market was struggling and Europe seemed increasingly unsafe. Gabo was a fluent speaker and writer in German, French, and English in addition to his native Russian. Constructed Head No. Model for 'Column' was created in 1921 by Naum Gabo in Constructivism style. The essence of Gabo's art was the exploration of space, which he believed could be done without having to depict mass. 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. 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. His command of several languages contributed greatly to his mobility during his career. Naum Gabo, ein russischer Konstruktivist in Berlin 1922-1932: Skulpturen, Zeichnungen und Architekturentwrfe, Dokumente und Archive aus der Sammlung der Berlinischen Galerie, ed. The work is composed of six meditations, in which Descartes attempts to establish a firm With London in danger of Luftwaffe attacks, Hepworth and Nicholson had retreated to the Cornish coast, and St. Ives had seemed the safest option for Naum and Miriam too, though only temporarily. Perspex and nylon - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. In generating the impression of volume in empty space, Gabo was responding to contemporary scientific theories stressing the "disintegration between solids and surrounding space". For Gabo, the string literally constitutes the surface of the sculpture, replacing his earlier practice of scoring lines onto Perspex. 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. As in the earlier Linear Construction, space is contained without being filled, a new and elegant way of emphasizing volume independently of mass. October 30, 1997, By Christina Lodder / It is March 1950 and Naum Gabo (1890-1977), the world-famous sculptor, is stabbing a mahogany table leg. The piece now at Yale was bought by the Socit Anonyme from the artist. Pencil and india ink on paper - Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow. 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. A model for the column 104cm high in plastic, wood and metal which belonged to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Andover, Massachusetts, from 1949 to 1952 (until exchanged for another work), and which is now in the Guggenheim Museum, New York. 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. In 1946 Gabo and his wife and daughter emigrated to the United States, where they resided first in Woodbury, and later in Middlebury, Connecticut. 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. 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. This is a relatively simple construction by Gabo's standards, consisting of a plain steel rod affixed to a wooden base. (German) Naum Gabo, 1890-1977, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 1990. 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. 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. The designs also bespoke Gabo's ongoing commitment, in spite of his awareness of the realities of Stalinism, to the Soviet project of constructing a new social realm. 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. Column is a freestanding vertical tower made from two transparent, interlocking, rectangular planes that rise from a circular base of dark steel. The "Project for a Radio Station" which I did in the winter of 1919-20, and Tatlin's model for the 3rd International done a year earlier, indicate the trend of our thoughts at that time. Nonetheless, in 1946, he and his new family finally made the long-awaited move to the USA, mainly on the promise of finding a more lucrative market for Gabo's work. Over the next two years, while living and working in the turbulent environment of post-Revolutionary Moscow, Gabo began to fall out with other artists, in a pattern that would become familiar. During this period he realised a design for a fountain in Dresden (since destroyed). 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". In Northern Europe, Gabo inspired a younger generation of artists, including the mid-century Concrete Artists - Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill, Joseph Albers - through his emphasis on elementary forms, and British sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth through his use of stringing techniques, and his incorporated of empty space into the body of the sculpture. Metal, wood and electric motor - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. Gabo and Antoine Pevsner had a joint exhibition at the Galerie Percier, Paris in 1924 and the pair designed the set and costumes for Diaghilev's ballet La Chatte (1926) that toured in Paris and London. "Standing Wave" is a physician's term, used to describe exactly the kind of static-seeming patterns of movement, generated by the passage of energy through certain structures, which the sculpture creates. He incorporated principles from engineering and architecture into his creative explorations, and used his sculptures to describe and demonstrate new scientific concepts such as Einstein's space-time relativity. Naum Gabo, KBE born Naum Neemia Pevsner, was an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and the subsequent development of twentieth-century sculpture. Gabo would go on to exhibit regularly with the revolutionary Novembergruppe artists - named after the month in 1918 when Germany's own socialist uprising had begun - and to make links with artists such as Hans Richter and Kurt Schwitters. As in thought, so in feeling, a vague communication is no communication at all," Gabo once remarked. He attended the local gymnasium in Kursk, before moving to Munich in 1911 to study medicine at his father's insistence, later recollecting that this was partly due to his ability to heal his mother's headaches with his hands. This meant he could incorporate empty spaces into his sculptures. The model, like the later piece, is made of glass, plastic, and metal. Gabo's influence on modern art has been profound, though it is sometimes underemphasized in art history books. He was also innovative in his works, using a wide variety of materials including the earliest plastics, fishing line, bronze, sheets of Perspex, and boulders. Gabo saw the Revolution as the beginning of a renewal of human values. It was in his sculpture that he evaded all the chaos, violence, and despair he had survived. Naum, Miriam, and Nina lived in the USA for 30 years, settling briefly in New York, then moving to Woodbury, Connecticut in 1947. Foregoing the superficial abstractions of the Cubists and Futurists, and rejecting propagandist realism, the new art would use sculptural forms to present "depth" (empty space) rather than mass, and generate "kinetic rhythms" which would represent the element of time as well as the element of space. Presented by the artist 1977 Gabo found his time in Cornwall emotionally challenging, and he experienced severe creative block, potentially a psychological effect of the war: he was following developments in Europe with great anxiety, worried for his family, with whom he had all but lost touch. 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. Find more prominent pieces of installation at Wikiart.org best visual art database. An elegant public artwork constructed from curved, stainless steel plates, designed for installation in a pool of water, Revolving Torsion represents the culmination of principles of Kinetic art first explored over 50 years earlier by Gabo's Kinetic Construction. 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. Gabo became acquainted with the multitude of Russian artists who had returned after the Revolution, engaged in the collective frenzy of attempting to express the spirit of Soviet society in art. As a young man in post-Revolutionary Russia, Gabo was closely associated with Constructivism, The critic Herbert Read hailed it as 'the highest point ever reached by the aesthetic intuition of man'. He sometimes even used motors to move the sculpture. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions.
After school in Kursk, Gabo entered Munich University in 1910, first studying medicine, then the natural sciences, and attended art history lectures by Heinrich Wlfflin. Russian-American Sculptor, Designer, and Architect. "Inspiration: a functional approach to creative practice", "V&A conservators race to preserve art and design classics in plastic", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Naum_Gabo&oldid=1133235691, Honorary Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 12 January 2023, at 20:48. Gabo wrote to the Addison Gallery on 13 March 1949: 'I don't know whether I need to emphasise that this work of mine is of great importance not only to my own development, but it can be historically proved that it is a cornerstone in the whole development of contemporary architecture. Over the years his exhibitions have generated immense enthusiasm because of the emotional power present in his sculpture. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? As a Russian, he was under constant suspicion, and had to report regularly to the police until 1941, when Britain and Russia became uneasy allies. In 1931, towards the end of his decade in Germany, Gabo produced architectural plans for a government competition to create a new building in Moscow, commemorating the founding of the USSR. Constructed Head No. Artwork page for Spiral Theme, Naum Gabo, 1941 When Spiral Theme was shown in wartime London, it was greeted with popular acclaim. 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. 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. It was first exhibited in 1920, to great critical acclaim. As the string nears the central core, it is wound with increasing density, creating a mesmeric gradation of depth. 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). It is March 1950 and Naum Gabo (1890-1977), the world-famous sculptor, is stabbing a mahogany table leg. 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. This show featured over 700 works, including paintings, sculptures, set designs, and architectural models, and was a significant event in the reception of Constructivism in Northern Europe. May 7, 1938, By Martin Kemp / Artist: Naum Gabo, American, born Russia, 18901977 Model of the Column (formerly Model for Glass Fountain) ca. This subtle interplay is complemented by the interplay of shadows on the pool of water below. He later recalled that though such works had a profound effect on him, they "were all dead", and "it was nature that impressed him, not art". 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. Using his engineering training, Gabo rejected traditional sculptural techniques of carving and moulding, instead using processes closer to architectural construction, building up his sculptures from interlocking components. 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. His first print was a wood engraving in a section of wood taken from a piece of furniture and printed onto a piece of toilet paper. He was part of the St Ives group in Cornwall, alongside Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. The steel used in the sculpture, in turn, was chosen by Gabo for its resemblance to water, with the result that the distinction between the two elements - liquid and solid - is blurred. Gabo and Pevsner promoted the manifesto by staging an exhibition on a bandstand on Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow and posted the manifesto on hoardings around the city. 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 grew from Gabo's unrealized plans for two public sculptures to stand outside the new Esso Building at the Rockefeller Center in New York. Then, in the summer of 1941, art patron Margaret Gardiner offered Gabo 25 to produce a work for her partner, the scientist John Bernal. His ingenious extension of Cubist painting techniques into the realm of sculpture predicated much abstract sculpture of the following decades. Because of his involvement in these intellectual debates, Gabo became a leading figure in Moscows avant garde, in post-Revolution Russia. 2023 The Art Story Foundation. Model for 'Column' was created in 1921 by Naum Gabo in Constructivism style. The Pevsners were a large, tightknit, patriarchal middle-class family, with a strong and charismatic father, Boris, and mother, Fanny. In a note on this work published in Read and Martin, op. Born in Russia, he had lived in Germany, Norway, France and then from 1936 to 1946 in England. Column is a representative piece of constructivist sculpture. He clashed with El Lissitzky, for example, over an article by Lissitsky which Gabo claimed had plagiarized concepts from Realistic Manifesto, speaking of a "dry and bitter spirit of hostility between them". Key to this work, considered by many critics to be amongst Gabo's finest, are the harmonious, organic rhythms generated by the interplay of curved lines, and the complex patterns of reflected light which shift and reconfigure as the viewer moves around the sculpture. Constructed Head No. 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". 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. A reverse structure, and a kind of companion piece, to Linear Construction in Space No. 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. Light catches the transparent plastic, generating a shimmering, ethereal-seeming structure, and creating the illusion of motion as the viewer moves around the sculpture. In 1950, Gabo began wood-block printing, an activity which would occupy him until his death, generating a significant body of work. They were often projects for monumental public schemes, rarely achieved, in which sculpture and architecture came together. 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'. Jrn Merkert, Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1989, 158 pp. As news of the February 1917 Revolution broke, Naum and Antoine returned home to Russia, in time for the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. Artists such as Alexander Calder, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely, and Bridget Riley all worked in the wake of Gabo's pioneering experiments. Portland Stone - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. Many of Gabo's sculptures first appeared as tiny models. Gabo's plans, on which he worked feverishly for several months, consisted of two vast auditoria constructed from reinforced concrete, protruding from a towering central service block. Naum Gabo's structurally complex, mesmeric abstract sculptures cast a shadow over the whole of 20th-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. During this time he won acclamations by many critics and awards like the $1000 Mr and Mrs Frank G. Logan Art Institute Prize at the annual Chicago and Vicinity exhibition of 1954. Gabos vision is imaginative and passionate. This piece of sculpture by Naum Gabo is a model for a larger piece he completed in 1923 called Column. The transparent planes build upon and reveal the sections below, suggesting emergence and growth. To a sibling he wrote: "I'm very sorry I've had to absorb such a mass of interesting impressions alone". 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. Cellulose, acetate and Perspex - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. After school in Kursk, Gabo entered Munich University in 1910, first studying medicine, then the natural sciences, and attended art history lectures by Heinrich Wlfflin. 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. Surrounded by fjords, and mountains where they would ski on weekends, the brothers were funded by their father, thereby avoiding both paid work and the horrors of war in Europe. Spiral Theme also helped to ensure Gabo's reputation within Britain. His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works that assimilated new materials such as nylon, wire, lucite and semi-transparent materials, glass and metal. 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. In breaking down the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, integrating engineering techniques and scientific concepts into his creative process, and using industrial materials, he made a vital contribution to the development of Constructivist aesthetics. Imaginative as Gabo was, his practicality lent itself to the conception and production of his works. During this time he won acclamations by many critics and awards like the $1000 Mr and Mrs Frank G. Logan Art Institute Prize at the annual Chicago and Vicinity exhibition of 1954. Two preoccupations, unique to Gabo, were his interest in representing negative space"released from any closed volume" or massand time. 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. Exh: Gabo's pioneering experiments in the field of kinetic sculpture were advanced by the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder, and by the Kinetic Art movement of the 1950s-60s. The two interlocking vertical planes in this piece, for example, generate a rectangular form without creating a solid rectangle. 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. At the same time, the sculpture spoke to a spiritual concern which had been present in his aesthetic as far back as The Realistic Manifesto (1920), but which was now becoming more pronounced, with the central, framed space evoking ideas of the infinite and the cosmic. Naum Gabo: The Constructive Process, Tate Gallery, November 1976-January 1977 (17, repr.) Visit the Frank Lloyd Wrightdesigned Guggenheim Museum in NYC, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 20 separate versions exist of this sculpture, strung together in complex and delicate configurations, light catching the nylon filament to emphasize what Gabo called a "sense of immateriality". Perspex, wood, metal, and glass - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York. In his work, Gabo used time and space as construction elements and in them solid matter unfolds and becomes beautifully surreal and otherworldly. Naum Gabo, KBE born Naum Neemia Pevsner, was an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and the subsequent development of twentieth-century sculpture. He devised systems of construction which were not only used for his elegantly elaborate sculptures but were viable for architecture as well. The piece now at Yale was bought by the Socit Anonyme from the artist c.1927-9. Instead, they remained in St Ives for seven years, meeting with other artists regularly at Adrian Stokes's coastal property to discuss, according to Gabo, "Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Eastern philosophies, and English marine traditions, behind the blackout curtains". It is abstract, geometric, and created with industrial design methods. 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. Drawing inspiration from his natural surroundings - a relatively new creative approach for Gabo - and from a series of photographs he had made that summer of light patterns reflected from shiny surfaces, Gabo created the first maquette for Spiral Theme. The abstract compositional vocabulary of works like Column was not abstract for the sake of it, but was intended as a means of defining the new ways in which Soviet citizens might feel, perceive, and act within the world around them. Gabo grew up in a Jewish family of six children in the provincial Russian town of Bryansk, where his father owned a factory. Such efforts were galvanized by the formalisation of ideas associated with Constructivism, partly through the creation of the First Working Group of Constructivists in Moscow in March 1921. In the 1960s a project for enlarging Column had floundered in part, precisely because of his desire to ensure aesthetic quality.21 In 1971, however, Gabo had enough faith in Knud Jensen, director of the Louisiana Museum, to allow him to oversee the construction of a pair of large Columns in Denmark, using Gabos model, his specifications, and incorporating transparent Naum Gabo, KBE born Naum Neemia Pevsner (5 August[O.S. This piece of sculpture by Naum Gabo is a model for a larger piece he completed in 1923 called Column. He then moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, USA. The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. Naum gabo artwork. The construction was therefore intended precisely to demonstate a scientific principle, and as a more sophisticated, scientifically accurate rendering of motion than the Futurists had managed with their rather excitable paintings. As a young man in post-Revolutionary Russia, Gabo was closely associated with Constructivism, The plan for Revolving Torsion was hatched following a visit from Norman Reid, director of the Tate Gallery, to Gabo's studio in the USA. His influence was important to the development of modernism within St Ives, and it can be seen most conspicuously in the paintings and constructions of John Wells and Peter Lanyon, both of whom developed a softer more pastoral form of Constructivism. 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. To escape the rise of the Nazis in Germany the pair stayed in Paris in 193235 as members of the Abstraction-Creation group with Piet Mondrian. The transparent planes build upon and reveal the sections below, suggesting emergence and growth. For the British artists, the string is an addition to the dominant sculptural form, and is widely spaced, adding distinct lines and texture which contrast with solid mass. He made his first geometrical constructions while living in Oslo in 1915. Gabos acute awareness of turmoil sought out solace in the peacefulness that was so fully realized in his ideal art forms. In essence, these pieces reflect a shift in Gabo's way of thinking about the depiction of empty space as volume, something he now felt was best achieved with spherical rather than angular forms. 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