Naum Gabo

Born 1890 – Died 1977

Naum Gabo was born in Bryansk, Russia. He worked alongside Kandinsky, Tatlin and Malevich until 1921, when he moved to Berlin. There he and his brother, Antoine Pevsner, became leading exponents of Constructivist art, and in their jointly authored manifesto of 1920 they asserted the relationship between art to science and every aspect of modern life, writing that art, ‘should attend us everywhere that life flows and acts’. Gabo’s sculpture prioritised light, space and the kinetic, and the artist often made use of new materials, including plastics. In 1927, he and Pevsner designed striking, modernist sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes production of La Chatte, which opened in Paris before touring Europe. In Paris, Gabo met Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth through the ‘Abstraction-Création’ group, and after visiting England, finally moved to London in Spring 1936, living in Hampstead where neighbours included Leslie Martin, Herbert Read and Margaret Gardiner. Gabo’s work was included in Nicolete Gray’s Abstract and Concrete exhibition which opened in Oxford in February 1936, touring to several locations including the Gordon Fraser Gallery in Cambridge. With Ben Nicholson, Leslie Martin, Barbara Hepworth and Sadie Speight, Gabo contributed to and co-edited the publication Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art published by Faber in 1937 and on the outbreak of war moved with his wife Miriam to St. Ives in Cornwall. In 1946 they emigrated to America, where Gabo was able to work on a larger scale, taking on numerous high-profile commissions.