In 1950, Gabo began wood-block printing, an activity which would occupy him until his death, generating a significant body of work. An illusion of movement is created as the smooth, wave-like shapes seem to advance and recede. Gabo also began attending the art-history lectures of an influential tutor, Heinrich Wlfflin. 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. Described by siblings as a "mischievous and daredevil character", he soon looked for radical ways of expressing himself. 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. 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. 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. Presented by the artist 1977 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. 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. Constructed Head No. 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. This is a relatively simple construction by Gabo's standards, consisting of a plain steel rod affixed to a wooden base. 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. He was part of the St Ives group in Cornwall, alongside Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Constructed Head No. '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. Gabo's engineering training was key to the development of his sculptural work that often used machined elements. The same year, he became a citizen of the United States, and in 1953 the family moved to Middlebury, Connecticut. Two preoccupations, unique to Gabo, were his interest in representing negative space"released from any closed volume" or massand time. "Naum Gabo Artist Overview and Analysis". 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. [1] These include Constructie, a 25-metre (82ft) 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. Gabo sent a maquette to London, where Reid located a sponsor to fund the construction of the final piece and find a suitable location. During this period he realised a design for a fountain in Dresden (since destroyed). Vassar Miscellany News / See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. In retrospect, works like Column set the tone for aspects of Gabo's work throughout the rest of his career. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. Gabos vision is imaginative and passionate. Just before the onset of the First World War in 1914, Gabo discovered contemporary art, by reading Kandinskys Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which asserted the principles of abstract art. Showing his openness to new techniques and influences, Gabo inscribed dynamic rhythms into the surfaces of stone - his new-found fascination with this material would occupy him until his death. During his time in Germany, Gabo also worked with his brother, Antoine, who had settled in Paris in 1923, on the set for Sergei Diaghilev's ballet La Chatte (1927), and on other projects for Diaghilev's popular Ballet Russes company. 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 Naum gabo artwork. Ren Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is a philosophical treatise that was published in 1641. 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 ultimate winner was the pompous, neo-classical design of architect Boris Iofan. 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. The auditoria would be hollow, curvilinear, shell-like forms, absorbing stress evenly across their entire surfaces. This element of his work, initially developed to mould the mindset of the new Soviet citizen, influenced a whole paradigm within 20. The exactness of form leads the viewer to imagine journeying into, through, over and around his sculptures. 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. 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. 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. Born in Russia, he had lived in Germany, Norway, France and then from 1936 to 1946 in England. The piece now at Yale was bought by the Socit Anonyme from the artist c.1927-9. Visit the Frank Lloyd Wrightdesigned Guggenheim Museum in NYC, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ren Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is a philosophical treatise that was published in 1641. 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. 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. Naum Gabo, ein russischer Konstruktivist in Berlin 1922-1932: Skulpturen, Zeichnungen und Architekturentwrfe, Dokumente und Archive aus der Sammlung der Berlinischen Galerie, ed. From an early age, Naum was strong-minded, rebellious, and politically driven. 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. Jrn Merkert, Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1989, 158 pp. 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. His ingenious extension of Cubist painting techniques into the realm of sculpture predicated much abstract sculpture of the following decades. This was not a happy period for him, politically or personally. Two years later, he defied his father's wishes by transferring to study maths, natural and applied sciences, engineering, and, finally, philosophy. ', Published in: This piece of sculpture by Naum Gabo is a model for a larger piece he completed in 1923 called Column. 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. 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". Then, in the summer of 1941, art patron Margaret Gardiner offered Gabo 25 to produce a work for her partner, the scientist John Bernal. Again, this sculpture represents a creative departure from Gabo's previous work. 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. Because of his involvement in these intellectual debates, Gabo became a leading figure in Moscows avant garde, in post-Revolution Russia. 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. .1927-9. After visiting London in 1935, Gabo settled in England the following year. 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. Intended to demonstrate ideas from modern geometry and physics, Gabo's use of space within sculpture stands alongside Stphane Mallarm's incorporation of page-space into poetry, and John Cage's incorporation of silence into music, in epitomizing a modern, secular concern with expressing what is unknown as well as what is known: with void as well as form. 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'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. These earliest constructions originally in cardboard or wood were figurative such as the Head No.2 in the Tate collection. Artwork page for Model for Column, Naum Gabo, 19201 Many of Gabo's sculptures first appeared as tiny models. 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. Around this time, he also saw many Post-Impressionist and Cubist works in Russia, where the entrepreneur and art-collector Sergei Shchukin exhibited his European collection regularly. Spiral Theme also helped to ensure Gabo's reputation within Britain. 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. 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. It is March 1950 and Naum Gabo (1890-1977), the world-famous sculptor, is stabbing a mahogany table leg. The model, like the later piece, is made of glass, plastic, and metal. The model, like the later piece, is made of glass, plastic, and metal. Discover (and save!) The full text of the article is here , Two Cubes (Demonstrating the Stereometric Method), Model for 'Construction in Space, Suspended', Construction in Space with Crystalline Centre, Model for 'Construction in Space 'Two Cones''. T02167 is presumably the tiny model referred to. Visit the Frank Lloyd Wrightdesigned Guggenheim Museum in NYC, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 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. Column is a representative piece of constructivist sculpture. Column is a representative piece of constructivist sculpture. Artist: Naum Gabo, American, born Russia, 18901977 Model of the Column (formerly Model for Glass Fountain) ca. Five thousand copies of the manifesto tract were displayed in Moscow streets in 1920. [7] His earliest constructions such as Head No.2 were formal experiments in depicting the volume of a figure without carrying its mass. 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. 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. 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". His scientific training would be put to good use in his later sculptural constructions, and it was in Munich that he became fascinated with Einstein and Bergson's radical theories of time. The same year he was introduced to Miriam Israels, who he would marry in 1937, with Nicholson and Hepworth as witnesses. 2023 The Art Story Foundation. Cellulose, acetate and Perspex - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. But the outbreak of war forced a change of plans. 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. Once again, in this late work, Gabo makes new strides in his ongoing quest to find ways of expressing volume independently of mass. Gabo was associated briefly with the Bauhaus School - then the hub of European Constructivism - lecturing and writing for their journal. 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. 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