Pevsner, Antoine

Pevsner, Antoine (1886–1962). Russian-born sculptor and painter who became a French citizen in 1930. He was the elder brother of Naum Gabo and like him one of the pioneers of Constructivism. Born in Orel, he grew up in Briansk and studied at the School of Fine Arts in Kiev, 1902–9, then briefly at the Academy in St Petersburg. Between 1911 and 1914 he made lengthy visits to Paris, where Archipenko and Modigliani were among his friends. After two years in Norway with Gabo he returned to Russia in 1917, and taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (and after the Revolution in the institutions descended from it—Svomas and Vkhutemas). After experimenting with various avant-garde styles, he had turned to abstraction by about 1918 (or perhaps a few years earlier—there is often difficulty in dating his work). In 1920 he was co-signatory of Gabo's Realistic Manifesto, which set forth the ideals of Constructivism, and in 1922 he helped to organize a major exhibition of Soviet art in Berlin. He left Russia in 1923 because the authorities were turning against the ‘pure’ art in which he was interested in favour of utilitarian work. After a few months in Berlin, he settled in Paris in October 1923 and lived there for the rest of his life.

Up to this time Pevsner had been a painter, but he now turned to sculpture, at first working mainly in plastic, then in welded metal. His early sculptures often retained vestiges of representation, as in his witty Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (Yale University Art Gallery, 1926), but increasingly he worked in a pure abstract idiom. His later work was characterized by bold spiralling forms (Dynamic Projection in the 30th Degree, Baltimore Museum of Art, 1950–1). Pevsner was a founder member of Abstraction-Création in 1931 and was influential in transmitting Constructivist ideas to other artists in the group. His style was similar to that of Gabo, but his outlook was different in important ways, for he had a religious rather than a scientific cast of mind; he thought that ‘the power of the constructive work must be like that of painting, which represents the divine song and music; it must have an active life of great power and eternal salvation.’ By the end of his career Pevsner was a much honoured figure. In 1956, for example, he had a large retrospective exhibition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, in 1958 he represented France at the Venice Biennale, and in 1961 he was awarded the Legion of Honour. There are examples of his work in many collections of modern art, including the Tate Gallery, London.