Naum Gabo (Pevsner)

Naum Gabo – A rebellious spirit sought his own path

Naum Gabo was born in Bryansk in the Russian Empire; the sixth of seven children of a Jewish couple, he was strongly influenced in his childhood by Russian Orthodoxy through his nurse. His elder brother Antoine Pevsner also turned to art, but what initially started as an active exchange between the brothers developed more and more into rivalry over the years, and Gabo later adopted his pseudonym to avoid confusion with his brother. The independent Gabo struggled with authority: he was forced to leave school because of a mocking poem about the principal, was arrested at the age of 17 for distributing socialist literature, and was only saved from the worse by the influence of his father, a metal manufacturer. In 1910, Gabo reluctantly began studying medicine in Munich, but soon moved to the Technical University, whilst simultaneously attending art history lectures with Heinrich Wölfflin. 

The renewal of the art of sculpture

Naum Gabo met Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and became fascinated with abstraction. An excursion on foot through North Italy led him to believe that fine art needed a watershed, and he became occupied with a new form of sculpture. In 1913, he joined his brother Antoine Pevsner in Paris where the latter had already established himself as a painter, and it was during this time that Gabo attracted attention with his first sculptural works which benefitted from his engineering studies. The First World War drove Gabo and his brother Alexei to Oslo where he lived from his parents’ money and developed further his artistic ideas and concepts. After the end of the October Revolution in 1917, he returned to Russia, and whilst his sculptural designs became ever more daring and monumental, external conditions offered fewer and fewer opportunities to put them into practice. In times of poverty and crisis at the height of the civil war, Naum Gabo could only communicate his art theoretically: Together with his brother Antoine Pevsner, he published the Realist Manifesto which accused Cubism and Futurism of not consistently carrying out abstraction, proclaimed the principles of Constructivism, and exerted a very considerable influence on the development of sculpture. The basic idea of Gabo’s understanding of art was that sculpture should no longer be a formed mass, but a construction of crossed surfaces. He was concerned with nothing less than the vision of a new order. 

Persecution by Communists and National Socialists

Fluent in German, French and English as well as his native Russian, Naum Gabo was able to communicate and assert himself on the international art scene with ease, but could not curb the prevailing political ideologies: After his successful participation in the First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin in 1922, where he was able to show a large number of his Constructivist works, he was no longer liked in Russia because his artistic principles did not conform to the Communist guidelines. In 1937 he married the American painter Miriam Pevsner, a great nice of the painter Joszef Israëls, and had to witness how the National Socialists defamed his art as ‘degenerate’ and confiscated and destroyed three of his drawings. Naum Gabo found a safe home in the USA, taught architecture at Harvard University in Boston, and continued his artistic work. After the end of the Second World War, he took part twice at Documenta in Kassel.

Naum Gabo died on 23 August 1977 in Waterbury in the US state of Connecticut.