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 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. This was an adventurous approach to the concept of load-bearing in architecture, a job that would generally be performed by distinct components such as beams or ribs. 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. The various versions of Linear Construction in Space No. 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. 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. 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. 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. About this artwork. 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". Jrn Merkert, Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1989, 158 pp. 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.) 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. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. 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. In this sense, the work represented Gabo's lingering commitment to Soviet utopian ideals, even this late into Russia's socialist experiment. 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. 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. Public response to the work in the London Museum show was similarly positive, its lush organic forms perhaps providing a similar form of solace to a public in the grips of war as the shells of Carbis Bay had to its creator. The Tate Gallery in London, which has the world's largest collection of his early works, is battling their chemical degradation. Ren Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is a philosophical treatise that was published in 1641. ", "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. 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's health began to fail in his 80s, and he died in 1977 in Waterbury, Connecticut, following a long illness. At the same time, it is perhaps the most literal of Gabo's Kinetic sculptures - he called it more of an "explanation of the idea than a Kinetic sculpture itself" - and he progressed from here to works that suggested rather than embodied movement, through their dynamic arrangement of form and space. Gabo grew up in a Jewish family of six children in the provincial Russian town of Bryansk, where his father owned a factory. Russian-American Sculptor, Designer, and Architect. Column is a representative piece of constructivist sculpture. He made his first geometrical constructions while living in Oslo in 1915. He then moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, USA. Gabo had no formal artistic training. 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. 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. 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 exactness of form leads the viewer to imagine journeying into, through, over and around his sculptures. 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 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. 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. Constructed Head No. The model, like the later piece, is made of glass, plastic, and metal. 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. 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. His command of several languages contributed greatly to his mobility during his career. Artwork page for Spiral Theme, Naum Gabo, 1941 When Spiral Theme was shown in wartime London, it was greeted with popular acclaim. For Gabo, the string literally constitutes the surface of the sculpture, replacing his earlier practice of scoring lines onto Perspex. October 30, 1997, By Christina Lodder / Cellulose, acetate and Perspex - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. He would later remark that "if anyone made me a Jew, it was Hitler". 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. 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. Model for 'Torsion', however, was eventually translated into a large fountain outside St Thomas' Hospital in London. Tate Papers / 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. The essence of Gabo's art was the exploration of space, which he believed could be done without having to depict mass. "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. Born in Russia, he had lived in Germany, Norway, France and then from 1936 to 1946 in England. In the calmness at the still centre of even his smallest works, we sense the vastness of space, the enormity of his conception, time as continuous growth." 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. The model, like the later piece, is made of glass, plastic, and metal. In his work, Gabo used time and space as construction elements and in them solid matter unfolds and becomes beautifully surreal and otherworldly. 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. 2022-10-21. 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. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet. Autumn 2007. 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. Moscow was caught up in a tumultuous mix of revolutionary fervor and the strife of civil war. 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. Kinetic Construction was devised partly to demonstrate the aesthetic concepts proclaimed in Gabo and Pevsner's Realistic Manifesto. The critic Herbert Read hailed it as 'the highest point ever reached by the aesthetic intuition of man'. This piece of sculpture by Naum Gabo is a model for a larger piece he completed in 1923 called Column. 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. His career october 30, 1997, by Christina Lodder / Cellulose, acetate and Perspex - collection the. 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