your own Pins on Pinterest [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]. Constructivist. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet. de la Croix, Horst and Richard G. Tansey, Gabo, Naum. 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. Once again, in this late work, Gabo makes new strides in his ongoing quest to find ways of expressing volume independently of mass. 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. One of Gabo's most important discoveries was that empty space could be used as an element of sculpture. In this sense, the work represented Gabo's lingering commitment to Soviet utopian ideals, even this late into Russia's socialist experiment. It is March 1950 and Naum Gabo (1890-1977), the world-famous sculptor, is stabbing a mahogany table leg. In Germany Gabo came into contact with the artists of the de Stijl and taught at the Bauhaus in 1928. Naum Gabo Gabo was born in Russia and trained in Munich as a scientist and engineer. This can be the poets own work, a specific poet, or a combination of many poets. 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. 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''. kiss ordeals that test your belief as pathways 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. This group idealized the principles of engineering and architecture, and wanted art to have a similarly functional purpose. [8], Gabo pioneered the use of plastics, such as cellulose acetate, in his sculptures. The Pevsners were a large, tightknit, patriarchal middle-class family, with a strong and charismatic father, Boris, and mother, Fanny. It is one of a number of works signifying Gabos departure from his early figurative style towards pure abstraction. In 1910, after schooling in Kursk, Gabo entered Munich University to study medicine. 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. He was a fluent in German, French, and English, in addition to his native Russian. Naum Gabo Constructivism, Kinetic Art, Bauhaus, Op Art, Biomorphism, Direct Carving Born: 5 August 1890, Bryansk, Russia Nationality: Russian - American Died: 23 August 1977, Connecticut, USA Gabo was a sculptor, theorist, and a key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and development of twentieth-century sculpture. He lacked confidence in his art, and there were tensions and jealousy between him and his brother. Naum GaboConstructivism, Kinetic Art, Bauhaus, Op Art, Biomorphism, Direct CarvingBorn: 5 August 1890, Bryansk, RussiaNationality: Russian AmericanDied: 23 August 1977, Connecticut, USA, Gabo was a sculptor, theorist, and a key figure in Russias post-Revolution avant-garde and development of twentieth-century sculpture. 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. [Internet]. 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. 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. Gabo was offered the studio behind Peter Lanyon's red house whilst the younger artist was away fighting. 2 is known to have been one of Gabo's favorite works, and it signals arguably the final significant creative shift of Gabo's career, taking him towards the large, public works of the 1950s-70s. ", "In the squares and on the streets we are placing our work Art should attend us everywhere that life flows and acts.at the bench, at the table, at work, at rest, at play in order that the flame to live should not extinguish in mankind. [7] His earliest constructions such as Head No.2 were formal experiments in depicting the volume of a figure without carrying its mass. 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. Gabo's influence on modern art has been profound, though it is sometimes underemphasized in art history books. The ideal art, he maintained, was one that dissolved, becoming folded in with life itself. 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. While in Cornwall he continued to work, albeit on a smaller scale. ", "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. The page you're looking for is not available. As news of the February 1917 Revolution broke, Naum and Antoine returned home to Russia, in time for the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. At the start of the First World War he moved to Norway, where, inspired by new scientific thinking about time, space and matter, he began to . It was in his sculpture that he evaded all the chaos, violence, and despair he had survived. 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. The dynamic arrangement of string-work and Perspex creates three-dimensional light patterns which transform as the viewer moves around the object. . Gabos vision is imaginative and passionate. He studied medicine, then physics and engineering in Munich. 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. Gabo was influenced by scientists who were developing new ways of understanding space, time and matter. 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. 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. Light catches the transparent plastic, generating a shimmering, ethereal-seeming structure, and creating the illusion of motion as the viewer moves around the sculpture. 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. These earliest constructions originally in cardboard or wood were figurative such as the Head No.2 in the Tate collection. 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 grew up in a Jewish family of six children in the provincial Russian town of Bryansk, where his father owned a factory. The fact that it was intended as a model for a building exemplifies the Constructivist concern with giving art a functional purpose. 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. 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. 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. The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. He began making constructed sculpture in Norway in 1915, when he took the name of Gabo. Naum Gabo, KBE born Naum Neemia Pevsner (5 August [ O.S. 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. 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. Gabo also began attending the art-history lectures of an influential tutor, Heinrich Wlfflin. 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. He was part of the St Ives group in Cornwall, alongside Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. 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. 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"'. 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. 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". During 1912-13, Gabo made his first trips to Paris with his brother Antoine, to whom he was very close. 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. 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. Described by siblings as a "mischievous and daredevil character", he soon looked for radical ways of expressing himself. Norway was quiet and tranquil. [1] 18 January] 1886 12 April 1962) was a Russian-born sculptor and the older brother of Alexii Pevsner and Naum Gabo. The exactness of form leads the viewer to imagine journeying into, through, over and around his sculptures. Boris Pevsner owned a successful metal works and rolling mill, which supplied many of the railways around Russia. Naum Gabo: The Constructive Process, Tate Gallery, November 1976-January 1977 (17, repr.) In 1932, Gabo fled the "unbreathable" atmosphere of Germany for Paris, where he would remain for four years. I see her face concealed in flames of fire, Originally posted on Jezzie G: The Cethramtu Rannaigechta Moire is an Irish poetic form consisting of quatrains (four-line stanzas). Naum Gabo biography. Metal, wood and electric motor - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. 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. 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". He demonstrated in his work the potentialities of plastics and threaded constructions. 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. 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. Artist: Naum Gabo, American, born Russia, 1890-1977. A French form, it consists of five or six stanzas with an envoi about half the size of one of the stanzas. Plastic and nylon threads - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. Herbert Read and Leslie Martin, Gabo: Constructions, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Engravings From an early age, Naum was strong-minded, rebellious, and politically driven. Contents. 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. Poetry, stories, art, and music from the desk of Jezzie G, Column1923Kinetic ArtPerspex, wood, metal, and glassSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA. Gabo was influenced by scientists who were developing new ways of understanding space, time and matter. During his travels to Paris in 1912-13, Gabo had seen Picasso and Braque's paintings - the artists were still in their so-called Analytical Cubis" phase - and in Norway he began to apply similar concepts of breaking up the picture plane into three-dimensional work - consider Picasso's Woman with Pears (1909), for example. 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