Gabo, Naum ( Naum Neemia Pevsner) (1890– 1977). Russian-born sculptor who became an American citizen in 1952, the most influential exponent of
Constructivism. He was born in Klimovichi, Belarus, and brought up in Briansk, where his father ran a prosperous metallurgy business. His surname was originally Pevsner, but he adopted another family name, Gabo, in 1915 to avoid confusion with his younger brother, Antoine
Pevsner. In 1910 he began studying medicine at Munich University, but he soon switched to natural sciences, then engineering. 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 (originally the manifesto was issued as a poster to accompany an open-air exhibition of their work in Moscow). 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 leading 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. He had a joint exhibition with Pevsner at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1948, and in the remaining three decades of his life he became a much honoured figure, receiving various awards and carrying out numerous public commissions in America and Europe. 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 it is a development from models he was making in the 1920s. (Small models are a feature of his work; there are numerous examples in the Tate Gallery, London, which has an outstanding collection of Gabo material, presented by the artist himself.)
Gabo never trained as an artist, but came to art by way of his studies of engineering and science. He was one of the earliest to experiment with Kinetic sculpture (in 1919) and to make extensive and serious use of semi-transparent materials for a type of abstract sculpture that incorporates space as a positive element rather than displacing or enclosing it. Throughout his career he was an advocate of Constructivism not merely as an artistic movement but as the ideology of a way of life. In the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Naum Gabo: The Constructive Process’ (Tate Gallery, London, 1976) Teresa Newman writes: ‘Constructivism was and is “real” in the sense that it consists of three-dimensional, palpable images set in space … But constructive reality also has a philosophical dimension insofar as these sensuous images express a modern, life-affirming consciousness with materials and methods appropriate to our time. The constructive principle, in Gabo's words, “embraces the whole complex of human relationships to life: it is a mode of thinking, acting, perceiving and living.” Creation, for Gabo, is another word for life.’
