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Naum
Gabo

United States • 1890−1977

Naum Gabo (Neemia Berkovich Pevzner, August 5, 1890, Bryansk, Russia - August 23, 1977, Waterbury, USA) - Soviet, British, German, American sculptor, architect, designer, one of the ideologists and theorists of constructivist art.

Features of the artist Naum Gabo: Gabo created the first significant sculptures in Norway during the First World War, and at the same time invented a unique technique for constructing figures - stereometric. One of these sculptures, “Head No. 2,” is now stored in the Tate Gallery in London - a female bust assembled from metal plates. It was a peculiar experience of transferring the ideas of cubists into three-dimensional space, decomposing the image on projections into three-dimensional space. Gabo, who received a technical education, is also called the author of the first standing wave of kinetic sculpture in the art of art: a curved metal plate that was driven by a motor.
Naum Gabo became famous for his sculptural experiments with glass, plexiglass, strings. In these materials, he was attracted by the opportunity to build a composition that would be visible through and include unfilled air space along with material elements. In later works, Gabo is no longer inspired by technically advanced spatial structures, but by botanical, organic forms. In particular, illustrations by Ernst Haeckel.

Famous sculptures of Naum Gabo: “Head No. 2”, “Standing wave”, “Column”, “Construction in space (Crystal)”

Naum Pevzner was born in Russia, in a family for which scientific progress was considered the main value and achievement of the modern world. When his parents moved to Munich, Naum, of course, entered the Technical School, where his teachers were Albert Einstein and Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen. World War I prevented Nahum from completing his studies.

During the war, he lives in Norway, where he takes a pseudonym (so as not to be confused with his brother, also an artist) and begins to experiment with stereometric sculptures. Without an art education, he invents a completely new system for constructing an object in space, most likely, relying on his youthful technical and mathematical research.

The next 5 years, Naum Gabo will live in Russia - he accepted the revolution unconditionally and believed that with it the long-awaited renewal of art would come. He collaborated with VKHUTEMAS and made the first kinetic construction in this Russian period - “The Standing Wave”. Quickly enough, however, it becomes clear that the avant-garde ideas in the art of the new Soviet country cease to satisfy its ideologists. Naum Gabo manages to leave the country on time.

He will spend the next 10 years in Berlin: participating in exhibitions, creating scenography for Diaghilev’s ballet “Cat”, giving lectures in the famous Bauhaus, trying to develop architectural projects, becoming a real celebrity. But from here he will have to leave in order to avoid persecution. In 1933, with the advent of the Nazis, Gabo went to Paris, and then to England. Not surprisingly, the Tate’s British gallery contains so many important works by the sculptor - he is considered the main British ideologist of the art of constructivism, the inspirer and teacher of an entire generation of local artists, he was finally awarded the Order of the British Empire.

The last 30 years of his life, Naum Gabo spent with his family in the United States - in this country he stayed longer than anywhere else: he taught at Harvard, wrote important theoretical works, designed and even set up monumental avant-garde sculptures in different cities of the world.

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