Five thousand copies of the manifesto tract were displayed in Moscow streets in 1920. Naum Gabo, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 1999. About this artwork. This is not only in the material world surrounding us, but also in the mental and spiritual world we carry within us.". 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 contributed to the Agit-prop open air exhibitions and taught at 'VKhUTEMAS' the Higher Art and Technical Workshop, with Tatlin, Kandinsky and Rodchenko. As a young man in post-Revolutionary Russia, Gabo was closely associated with Constructivism, 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 described himself as "making images to communicate my feelings of the world." "[6] Gabo held a utopian belief in the power of sculpturespecifically abstract, Constructivist sculptureto express human experience and spirituality in tune with modernity, social progress, and advances in science and technology. 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. The abstract compositional vocabulary of works like Column was not abstract for the sake of it, but was intended as a means of defining the new ways in which Soviet citizens might feel, perceive, and act within the world around them. Less publicly, he derided Tatlin for "playing around with engineering forms and materials". Column is a representative piece of constructivist sculpture. Naum Gabo Naum Neemia Pevsner Born: August 5, 1890; Bryansk, Russian Federation Died: August 23, 1977; Waterbury, Connecticut, United States Nationality: Russian, Jewish Art Movement: Constructivism, Kinetic art Painting School: Abstraction-Cration, St Ives School Genre: sculpture Field: painting, sculpture 'I consider this Column the culmination of that search. 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. This piece of sculpture by Naum Gabo is a model for a larger piece he completed in 1923 called Column. As the string nears the central core, it is wound with increasing density, creating a mesmeric gradation of depth. 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. Again, this sculpture represents a creative departure from Gabo's previous work. your own Pins on Pinterest Portland Stone - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. The various versions of Linear Construction in Space No. To a sibling he wrote: "I'm very sorry I've had to absorb such a mass of interesting impressions alone". [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. 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. 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. Norway was quiet and tranquil. Using his engineering training, Gabo rejected traditional sculptural techniques of carving and moulding, instead using processes closer to architectural construction, building up his sculptures from interlocking components. The essence of Gabo's art was the exploration of space, which he believed could be done without having to depict mass. At the same time, the dynamic curves of the design represented a departure from the geometric aesthetics of the "International Style" then prevalent in modernist architecture, which Gabo had studied, and emulated in previous architectural sketches. Many other migr artists were congregating in England at this time, including old friends: Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Piet Mondrian. This move gave Naum the excuse he had craved to abandon his studies and concentrate on his art. 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. Gabo sent a maquette to London, where Reid located a sponsor to fund the construction of the final piece and find a suitable location. Artwork page for Spiral Theme, Naum Gabo, 1941 When Spiral Theme was shown in wartime London, it was greeted with popular acclaim. 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. Autumn 2007. The two interlocking vertical planes in this piece, for example, generate a rectangular form without creating a solid rectangle. The fact that it was intended as a model for a building exemplifies the Constructivist concern with giving art a functional purpose. The "Project for a Radio Station" which I did in the winter of 1919-20, and Tatlin's model for the 3rd International done a year earlier, indicate the trend of our thoughts at that time. In this sense, the work represented Gabo's lingering commitment to Soviet utopian ideals, even this late into Russia's socialist experiment. Gabo was associated briefly with the Bauhaus School - then the hub of European Constructivism - lecturing and writing for their journal. Two preoccupations, unique to Gabo, were his interest in representing negative space"released from any closed volume" or massand time. An illusion of movement is created as the smooth, wave-like shapes seem to advance and recede. Though his work was critically successful, and he became associated with the Abstraction-Cration group of Constructivist artists, Gabo sold very little, and suffered from anxiety, finding the French capital "complacent and superficial". 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. de la Croix, Horst and Richard G. Tansey, Gabo, Naum. The two brothers decided that the exhibition should be accompanied by a proclamation of their artistic ambitions, The Realistic Manifesto. Naum Gabo biography. 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. 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. 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''. Gabo's influence on modern art has been profound, though it is sometimes underemphasized in art history books. 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. Find more prominent pieces of installation at Wikiart.org best visual art database. Light catches the transparent plastic, generating a shimmering, ethereal-seeming structure, and creating the illusion of motion as the viewer moves around the sculpture. 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. Linear Construction in Space No. 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. At the same time, he was working on a series of increasingly abstract sculptural constructions. By the early 1930s, the political climate in Germany had grown increasingly nationalistic, anti-semitic, and toxic. 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. Model for 'Column' was created in 1921 by Naum Gabo in Constructivism style. In it, he sought to move past Cubism and Futurism, renouncing what he saw as the static, decorative use of color, line, volume and solid mass in favor of a new element he called "the kinetic rhythms () the basic forms of our perception of real time." As a young man in post-Revolutionary Russia, Gabo was closely associated with Constructivism, which sought to blur the boundaries between creative and functional processes. As in thought, so in feeling, a vague communication is no communication at all," Gabo once remarked. 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. 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. 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. 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. A sojourn in Paris from 1911 to 1914 introduced him to cubism and futurism, two radical new approaches to making art. Gabo grew up in a Jewish family of six children in the provincial Russian town of Bryansk, where his father owned a factory. 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. 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". Over the years his exhibitions have generated immense enthusiasm because of the emotional power present in his sculpture. It was first exhibited in 1920, to great critical acclaim. He made his first geometrical constructions while living in Oslo in 1915. "Naum Gabo Artist Overview and Analysis". 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. Foregoing the superficial abstractions of the Cubists and Futurists, and rejecting propagandist realism, the new art would use sculptural forms to present "depth" (empty space) rather than mass, and generate "kinetic rhythms" which would represent the element of time as well as the element of space. Lost in the Detail: Naum Gabo's Monoprints. Inspired by his war-time associates Moore and Hepworth, Gabo wanted to see if he could generate the sense of kinetic rhythm which his work relied on whilst utilizing a more conventional approach to sculpture. Gabo also devised plans for architectural forms, such as skyscrapers and car-parks, which were never realized. 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. 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. Kinetic Construction was Gabo's first motorized sculpture, demonstrating his pioneering integration of engineering techniques and scientific principles into art. Later versions of Kinetic Construction were more complex, incorporating a switch button, and built from more sophisticated materials. Pencil and india ink on paper - Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow. 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