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. It was in his sculpture that he evaded all the chaos, violence, and despair he had survived. 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. In this sense, the work represented Gabo's lingering commitment to Soviet utopian ideals, even this late into Russia's socialist experiment. A sojourn in Paris from 1911 to 1914 introduced him to cubism and futurism, two radical new approaches to making art. In 1946 Gabo and his wife and daughter emigrated to the United States, where they resided first in Woodbury, and later in Middlebury, Connecticut. 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. your own Pins on Pinterest This piece of sculpture by Naum Gabo is a model for a larger piece he completed in 1923 called Column. Visit the Frank Lloyd Wrightdesigned Guggenheim Museum in NYC, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Finished in St. Ives, it is one of a number of stone works from this period which represent Gabo's first experiments with the time-honored technique of direct carving. 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. Ren Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is a philosophical treatise that was published in 1641. The introduction of a liquid element into the body of the sculpture is highly significant, with the surfaces formed by the jets of water replacing the string meshwork of the Linear Constructions in creating the illusion of solid matter. 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. To a sibling he wrote: "I'm very sorry I've had to absorb such a mass of interesting impressions alone". His command of several languages contributed greatly to his mobility during his career. 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. 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. 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. 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". For Gabo, sculptures like Column, which gave a certain impression of weightlessness, "appeal[ed] to minds and feelings more than crude physical senses". 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. 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. Artwork page for Spiral Theme, Naum Gabo, 1941 When Spiral Theme was shown in wartime London, it was greeted with popular acclaim. 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. This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). Later versions of Kinetic Construction were more complex, incorporating a switch button, and built from more sophisticated materials. This element of his work, initially developed to mould the mindset of the new Soviet citizen, influenced a whole paradigm within 20. 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. 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. 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. 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. In 1976, Gabo's Revolving Torsion sculpture was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II at the opening of St Thomas's Hospital in Central London. 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. 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". 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. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. 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. 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. He made his first geometrical constructions while living in Oslo in 1915. 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). His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works "Naum Gabo Artist Overview and Analysis". 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. He sometimes even used motors to move the sculpture. 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. The work is composed of six meditations, in which Descartes attempts to establish a firm The Pevsners were a large, tightknit, patriarchal middle-class family, with a strong and charismatic father, Boris, and mother, Fanny. One of Gabo's most important discoveries was that empty space could be used as an element of sculpture. 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. From an early age, Naum was strong-minded, rebellious, and politically driven. 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 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. 1928, rebuilt 1938 Perspex and plastic on aluminum base 27 11.3 10 cm (10 5/8 4 7/16 3 15/16 in.) But this second construction in the series also reflects Gabo's new ambitions for his work after moving to the centre of global economic and cultural power after the Second World War, where wealthy patrons and lucrative commissions were more readily available. 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. 2 (1949), "We renounce in sculpture, the mass as a sculptural element [.] We renounce the thousand-year-old delusion in art that held the static rhythms as the only elements of the plastic and pictorial arts. 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. Two years later, he defied his father's wishes by transferring to study maths, natural and applied sciences, engineering, and, finally, philosophy. In retrospect, works like Column set the tone for aspects of Gabo's work throughout the rest of his career. [1] 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. 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. Hammer, Martin and Naum Gabo, Christina Lodder. 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. 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. While in Cornwall he continued to work, albeit on a smaller scale. The model, like the later piece, is made of glass, plastic, and metal. Kinetic Construction was devised partly to demonstrate the aesthetic concepts proclaimed in Gabo and Pevsner's Realistic Manifesto. In generating the impression of volume in empty space, Gabo was responding to contemporary scientific theories stressing the "disintegration between solids and surrounding space". Naum Gabo, ein russischer Konstruktivist in Berlin 1922-1932: Skulpturen, Zeichnungen und Architekturentwrfe, Dokumente und Archive aus der Sammlung der Berlinischen Galerie, ed. 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. 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. 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. 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. During 1912-13, Gabo made his first trips to Paris with his brother Antoine, to whom he was very close. The fact that it was intended as a model for a building exemplifies the Constructivist concern with giving art a functional purpose. They were often projects for monumental public schemes, rarely achieved, in which sculpture and architecture came together. ", "Sculpture personifies and inspires the ideas of all great epochs. 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. .1927-9. His older brother was fellow Constructivist artist Antoine Pevsner; Gabo changed his name to avoid confusion with him. 2 was Gabo's first significant work after his move to the USA in 1946. It was here he created his so-called Constructed Heads, signing them as Gabo rather than Pevsner to distinguish himself from his artist brother Antoine, who had joined Naum and Alexei in Norway, and to indicate a new, revolutionary direction in his art. 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. base: 0.3 cm (1/8 in.) Gabo worked through various movements and ideas, eventually settling in the United States after the Second World War. Gabo also devised plans for architectural forms, such as skyscrapers and car-parks, which were never realized. Column is a representative piece of constructivist sculpture. 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. Discover (and save!) 2022-10-21. 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. 2022-10-21. 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. Gabo was a fluent speaker and writer in German, French, and English in addition to his native Russian. 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. 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". 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