Gabo, Naum

Gabo, Naum ( Naum Neemia Pevsner) (b ?Klimovichi, Belarus, 5 Aug. 1890; d Waterbury, Conn., 23 Aug. 1977). Russian-born sculptor who became an American citizen in 1952, the most influential exponent of Constructivism. He was the younger brother of Antoine Pevsner, and adopted another family name, Gabo, in 1915 to avoid confusion between the two. After studying medicine, natural sciences, and engineering in Munich, he was introduced to avant-garde art when he visited his brother in Paris in 1913–14, and in 1915 he began to make geometrical constructions in Oslo, where they had taken refuge during the First World War. In 1917 the brothers returned to Russia and in 1920 they published their Realistic Manifesto, which set forth the basic principles of Constructivism. They advocated a pure abstract sculpture, but official policy in the new Soviet Russia increasingly insisted on art being channelled into industrial design and other socially useful work (as exemplified by Tatlin). Gabo therefore left Russia in 1922 and spent the next ten years in Berlin, where he knew many of the leading artists of the day, particularly those connected with the Bauhaus. In 1932 he moved to Paris, where he was a prominent member of the Abstraction-Création group, and in 1935 he settled in England, living first in London (where in 1937 he was co-editor of the Constructivist review Circle) and then from 1939 in Cornwall (see St Ives School).

In 1946 Gabo moved to the USA, settling at Middlebury, Connecticut, in 1953. In the last three decades of his life he received many prestigious awards and carried out numerous public commissions in Europe and America. He often worked on themes over a long period; his Torsion Fountain outside St Thomas's Hospital in London, for example, was erected in 1975, but is a development from models he was making in the 1920s. (Small models are a feature of his work; there are numerous examples in Tate Modern, which has an outstanding collection of Gabo material.)

Gabo never trained as an artist, but came to art by way of his studies of engineering and physical science, and was one of the first artists to embody in his work modern concepts of the nature of space. He was one of the earliest to experiment with Kinetic sculpture and to make extensive use of semi-transparent materials for a type of abstract sculpture that incorporates space as a positive element rather than displacing or enclosing it. He was throughout his life an advocate of the Constructivist idea not merely as an artistic movement but as the ideology of a way of life.