Naum Gabo was a pioneering Constructivist sculptor who used materials such as glass, plastic, and metal and created a sense of spatial movement in his work.
Background
Gabo was born Naum Pevsner on August 5, 1890, in the small Russian town of Bryansk, the sixth of seven brothers and sisters. The Pevsners were a large, tightknit, patriarchal middle-class family, with a strong and charismatic father, Boris, and mother, Fanny. 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. Boris Pevsner owned a successful metal works and rolling mill, which supplied many of the railways around Russia. 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. A third, Natan (later Antoine), four years older than Naum, became a successful artist, and was a significant influence on his younger brother, whose artistic curiosity was beginning to emerge through a love of poetry and early attempts at sculpture, informed by the Tsarist art that dominated his cultural landscape.
Education
Expelled from his primary school in 1904 for writing subversive poems about his headmaster, Naum Gabo was sent to Tomsk, where he inadvertently attended his first socialist meeting during the 1905 revolution. In a highly memorable and traumatic encounter, he witnessed the brutality of the Cossacks against a protester.
Gabo had no formal artistic training. 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. Two years later, he defied his father's wishes by transferring to study maths, natural and applied sciences, engineering, and, finally, philosophy. 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. Gabo also began attending the art-history lectures of an influential tutor, Heinrich Wölfflin.
In 1913, at Wölflinn's suggestion, Gabo embarked on a six-week walking tour of Italy, viewing Michelangelo's David and other Renaissance and classical masterpieces. He later recalled that though such works had a profound effect on him. His tour was aborted early due to lack of funds and apparent feelings of loneliness.
During 1912 - 1913, Gabo made his first trips to Paris with his brother Antoine, to whom he was very close. Together they visited the Salon des Indépendants, 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. Around this time, he also saw many Post-Impressionist and Cubist works in Russia.
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. This move gave Naum the excuse he had craved to abandon his studies and concentrate on his art. 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.
As news of the February 1917 Revolution broke, Naum and Antoine returned home to Russia, in time for the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. Moscow was caught up in a tumultuous mix of revolutionary fervor and the strife of civil war. 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. Despite severe economic hardship, Gabo threw himself into the cause over the next five years.
Meeting Trotsky on more than one occasion, during the early 1920s Gabo worked for the new Department of Fine Arts, 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. At the same time, he was working on a series of increasingly abstract sculptural constructions.
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. The two brothers decided that the exhibition should be accompanied by a proclamation of their artistic ambitions, The Realistic Manifesto. This document, written by Gabo, made history, galvanizing the spirit of rebellion and the urgent desire for change amongst a huge swath of Russian culture at this time. Gabo and Pevsner distributed 5000 copies on the streets of Moscow, calling for a new art for the people, a "new Great Style" which would capture the spirit of an "unfolding epoch of human history".
Over the next two years, while living and working in the turbulent environment of post-Revolutionary Moscow, Gabo began to fall out with other artists, in a pattern that would become familiar. 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." Less publicly, he derided Tatlin for "playing around with engineering forms and materials."
In 1922, Gabo emigrated to Berlin, where he would remain for ten years, assisting shortly after his arrival with the organization of the First Russian Art Exhibition at the Van Diemen Gallery, sponsored by the Russian Ministry for Information. Gabo would go on to exhibit regularly with the revolutionary Novembergruppe artists - named after the month in 1918 when Germany's own socialist uprising had begun - and to make links with artists such as Hans Richter and Kurt Schwitters.
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. Gabo also devised plans for architectural forms, such as skyscrapers and car-parks, which were never realized. 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.
In 1932, Gabo fled the "unbreathable" atmosphere of Germany for Paris, where he would remain for four years. This was not a happy period for him, politically or personally. Though his work was critically successful, and he became associated with the Abstraction-Création group of Constructivist artists, Gabo sold very little, and suffered from anxiety, finding the French capital "complacent and superficial." He lacked confidence in his art, and there were tensions and jealousy between him and his brother. After visiting London in 1935, Gabo settled in England the following year.
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. Gabo exhibited, alongside many of his compatriates, in the ground-breaking Abstract and Concrete show at London's Lefèvre 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. 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. But the outbreak of war forced a change of plans.
St. Ives, Cornwall had been home to a large community of artists since the 1920s, including Bernard Leach, Adrian Stokes, and the fisherman and artistic savant Alfred Wallis. 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. They moved there shortly before their planned journey to North America, but in September 1939, the passenger ferry the Athena was torpedoed by German submarines - the first such casualty of World War Two - and they were forced to cancel their trip. Instead, they remained in St Ives for seven years, meeting with other artists regularly at Adrian Stokes's coastal property.
Gabo found his time in Cornwall emotionally challenging, and he experienced severe creative block, potentially a psychological effect of the war: he was following developments in Europe with great anxiety, worried for his family, with whom he had all but lost touch. Gabo's émigré status didn't help matters. 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.
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." Gabo had also begun after his arrival in England to experiment with new materials such as Perspex and stone, influenced by the direct carving of Moore and Hepworth, though materials were increasingly hard to source, and sales were poor. In 1946, he and his new family finally made the long-awaited move to the USA, mainly on the promise of finding a more lucrative market for Gabo's work.
Naum, Miriam, and their daughter Nina lived in the USA for 30 years, settling briefly in New York, then moving to Woodbury, Connecticut in 1947. Away from war-torn Europe, Gabo found artistic freedom and financial security. 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 and Rodchenko. In 1950, Gabo began wood-block printing, an activity which would occupy him until his death, generating a significant body of work. In 1952 he became a citizen of the United States, and in 1953 the family moved to Middlebury, Connecticut.
During the 1960s - 1970s, 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. 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. In 1976, Gabo's Revolving Torsion sculpture was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II at the opening of St Thomas's Hospital in Central London. Gabo's health began to fail in his 80s, and he died in 1977 in Waterbury, Connecticut, following a long illness.
Returning to Russia after the Revolution, Gabo saw political forces redirect Russian art from exploration to propaganda.
Views
Gabo believed that art should have an explicit and functional value in society. 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.
One of Gabo's most important discoveries was that empty space could be used as an element of sculpture. Constructing his sculptures from sets of interlocking components rather than carving or moulding them from inert mass allowed him to incorporate space into his work more easily. Intended to demonstrate ideas from modern geometry and physics, Gabo's use of space within sculpture stands alongside Stéphane Mallarmé'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.
Quotations:
"Art and Science are two different streams which rise from the same creative force and flow into the same ocean of the common culture, but the currents of these two streams flow in different directions."
"It needs a poet like Schwitters to show us that unobserved elements of beauty are strewn and spread all around us and we can find them everywhere in the portentous as well as in the insignificant, if only we care to look, to choose and to fit them into a comely order."
Membership
To escape the rise of the Nazis in Germany Naum Gabostayed in Paris in 1932 – 1935 as members of the Abstraction-Creation group with Piet Mondrian.
Personality
From an early age, Naum was strong-minded, rebellious, and politically driven. Described by siblings as a "mischievous and daredevil character", he soon looked for radical ways of expressing himself.
Quotes from others about the person
The real stuff of Gabo’s art is not his physical materials, but his perception of space, time and movement. 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.
Connections
Naum Gabo was introduced to Miriam Israels, who he would marry in 1937, with Nicholson and Hepworth as witnesses. Miriam had been married to a businessman, Cyril Franklin, with whom she had three children, but she ended her marriage shortly after meeting Gabo. The couple remained together for the remainder of Gabo's life, ironically supporting themselves initially with money from Miriam's ex-husband, as well as funds from occasional sales of Gabo's work.