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. Tate Papers / He made his first geometrical constructions while living in Oslo in 1915. 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. 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. A reverse structure, and a kind of companion piece, to Linear Construction in Space No. (London 1957), note between pls.25 and 26, and p.183. Lost in the Detail: Naum Gabo's Monoprints. To a sibling he wrote: "I'm very sorry I've had to absorb such a mass of interesting impressions alone". In his work, Gabo used time and space as construction elements and in them solid matter unfolds and becomes beautifully surreal and otherworldly. 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 was born Naum Pevsner in the small Russian town of Bryansk, the sixth of seven brothers and sisters. Naum Gabo biography. 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. It is abstract, geometric, and created with industrial design methods. 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. This meant he could incorporate empty spaces into his sculptures. In 1976, Gabo's Revolving Torsion sculpture was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II at the opening of St Thomas's Hospital in Central London. 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. Linear Construction in Space, another work created during Gabo's time in St. Ives, is formed from nylon filament thread wound taut around a Perspex framework, creating an intricate web that encases a central void. 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. 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. 1928, rebuilt 1938 Perspex and plastic on aluminum base 27 11.3 10 cm (10 5/8 4 7/16 3 15/16 in.) 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 The two interlocking vertical planes in this piece, for example, generate a rectangular form without creating a solid rectangle. The dynamic arrangement of string-work and Perspex creates three-dimensional light patterns which transform as the viewer moves around the object. 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. 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. Find more prominent pieces of installation at Wikiart.org best visual art database. Naum gabo artwork. 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. Gabo was a fluent speaker and writer in German, French, and English in addition to his native Russian. Work by Gabo is also included at Rockefeller Center in New York City and The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York, US. 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. 'I consider this Column the culmination of that search. 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. Gabo chose to look past all that was dark in his life, creating sculptures that though fragile are balanced so as to give us a sense of the constructions delicately holding turmoil at bay. As news of the February 1917 Revolution broke, Naum and Antoine returned home to Russia, in time for the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. His tour was aborted early due to lack of funds and apparent feelings of loneliness. 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"'. 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. Light catches the transparent plastic, generating a shimmering, ethereal-seeming structure, and creating the illusion of motion as the viewer moves around the sculpture. Russian-American Sculptor, Designer, and Architect. 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 particular, the piece seems to enact the idea that "kinetic rhythms" should be "affirmed as the basic forms of our perception of real time", associable both with Einsteinian space-time relativity and (probably more directly) Henri Bergson's conception of time as non-linear. Gabo grew up in a Jewish family of six children in the provincial Russian town of Bryansk, where his father owned a factory. Discover (and save!) 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. base: 0.3 cm (1/8 in.) 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. 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. Gabo's engineering training was key to the development of his sculptural work that often used machined elements. It manifests the spiritual rhythm and directs it. Column is a representative piece of constructivist sculpture. 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. Artists such as Alexander Calder, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely, and Bridget Riley all worked in the wake of Gabo's pioneering experiments. 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. 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. 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. 1 (1942-43), Linear Construction in Space No. The auditoria would be hollow, curvilinear, shell-like forms, absorbing stress evenly across their entire surfaces. His older brother was fellow Constructivist artist Antoine Pevsner; Gabo changed his name to avoid confusion with him. "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. In a country starved of resources, Gabo had to rely on a friend who worked for Imperial Chemicals to provide these materials. 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. They were often projects for monumental public schemes, rarely achieved, in which sculpture and architecture came together. To find any part of machinery was next to impossible". Gabo's other concern as described in the Realistic Manifesto was that art needed to exist actively in four dimensions including time. As in the earlier Linear Construction, space is contained without being filled, a new and elegant way of emphasizing volume independently of mass. ), (London 1957), note between pls.25 and 26, and p.183, A model for the column 104cm high in plastic, wood and, 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. Herbert Read and Leslie Martin, Gabo: Constructions, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Engravings [8], Rejecting the traditional notion that prints should be made in editions of identical impressions, Gabo instead preferred to use the monoprint format as a vehicle for artistic experimentation. Constructed Head No. Works such as Column were in most cases only definitively realized after Gabo left Russia in 1922 for Germany: where, amongst other things, he had easier access to materials. He made the first of a series of small, three-dimensional models, using glass, metal and new plastics the following year but owing to the size and nature of the work, and the unstable nature of new plastics, he was unable to 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. As the string nears the central core, it is wound with increasing density, creating a mesmeric gradation of depth. 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. 2 2022-10-21. 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. 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. He made his first geometrical constructions while living in Oslo in 1915. Gabo's formative years were in Munich, where he was inspired by and actively participated in the artistic, scientific, and philosophical debates of the early years of the 20th century. 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. About this artwork. [7] His earliest constructions such as Head No.2 were formal experiments in depicting the volume of a figure without carrying its mass. Born in Russia, he had lived in Germany, Norway, France and then from 1936 to 1946 in England. 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. 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. [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. 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 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. ", "Sculpture personifies and inspires the ideas of all great epochs. 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. This move gave Naum the excuse he had craved to abandon his studies and concentrate on his art. The transparent planes build upon and reveal the sections below, suggesting emergence and growth. 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. For Gabo, sculptures like Column, which gave a certain impression of weightlessness, "appeal[ed] to minds and feelings more than crude physical senses". He moved back to Russia in 1917, to become involved in politics and art, spending five years in Moscow with his brother Antoine. 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 also devised plans for architectural forms, such as skyscrapers and car-parks, which were never realized. 2 is one of a set of early figurative works by Gabo now seen to have revolutionized sculpture. Visit the Frank Lloyd Wrightdesigned Guggenheim Museum in NYC, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 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. The transparent planes build upon and reveal the sections below, suggesting emergence and growth. 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. 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. Constructed Head No. 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". The exactness of form leads the viewer to imagine journeying into, through, over and around his sculptures. 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. 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. 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. 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. We would like to hear from you. Over the years his exhibitions have generated immense enthusiasm because of the emotional power present in his sculpture. 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. The same year he was introduced to Miriam Israels, who he would marry in 1937, with Nicholson and Hepworth as witnesses. 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. 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. Hammer, Martin and Naum Gabo, Christina Lodder. 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. 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. He was part of the St Ives group in Cornwall, alongside Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. 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. Gabo had lived through a revolution and two world wars; he was also Jewish and had fled Nazi Germany. An illusion of movement is created as the smooth, wave-like shapes seem to advance and recede. Lit: The Work of Naum Gabo Nina & Graham Williams / Tate, London 2023. Already, Bolshevik Russia was becoming hostile to artists of the avant-garde, as the grim paradigm of Socialist Realism appeared on the horizon. A sojourn in Paris from 1911 to 1914 introduced him to cubism and futurism, two radical new approaches to making art. Metal, wood and electric motor - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. 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. 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. 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. A larger version was created for the exhibition New Movements in Art: Contemporary Work in England, held at the London Museum in Spring 1942. During this period he realised a design for a fountain in Dresden (since destroyed). Discover (and save!) 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". 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. 2022-10-21. His command of several languages contributed greatly to his mobility during his career. Characteristically, though, he disagreed with some of their functionalist principles. Naum Gabo, ein russischer Konstruktivist in Berlin 1922-1932: Skulpturen, Zeichnungen und Architekturentwrfe, Dokumente und Archive aus der Sammlung der Berlinischen Galerie, ed. 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. Moscow was caught up in a tumultuous mix of revolutionary fervor and the strife of civil war. Naum gabo artwork Rating: 4,3/10 1459 reviews. 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. 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. The work is composed of six meditations, in which Descartes attempts to establish a firm Together they visited the Salon des Indpendants, exposing the young Gabo to the work of Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Delaunay, Leger, and others, and to the Cubist and Futurist ideas exploding onto the avant-garde scene. This subtle interplay is complemented by the interplay of shadows on the pool of water below. Gabo sent a maquette to London, where Reid located a sponsor to fund the construction of the final piece and find a suitable location. 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, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 1999. The model, like the later piece, is made of glass, plastic, and metal. This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). As a student of medicine, natural science and engineering, his understanding of the order present in the natural world mystically links all creation in the universe. The essence of Gabo's art was the exploration of space, which he believed could be done without having to depict mass. He then moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, USA. At the same time, he was working on a series of increasingly abstract sculptural constructions. Norway was quiet and tranquil. Nature / His friend, the art critic Herbert Read, described it as expressing "the highest point ever reached by the aesthetic intuition of man". 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.
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