28 Facts About Naum Gabo

Naum Gabo's work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works that assimilated new materials such as nylon, wire, lucite and semi-transparent materials, glass and metal.

Naum Gabo elaborated many of his ideas in the Constructivist Realistic Manifesto, which he issued with his brother, sculptor Antoine Pevsner as a handbill accompanying their 1920 open-air exhibition in Moscow.

Work by Gabo is included at Rockefeller Center in New York City and The Governor Nelson A Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York, US.

Naum Gabo grew up in a Jewish family of six children in the provincial Russian town of Bryansk, where his father, Boris Pevsner, worked as an engineer.

Naum Gabo was a fluent in German, French, and English, in addition to his native Russian.

In 1910, after schooling in Kursk, Naum Gabo entered Munich University to study medicine.

Naum Gabo then switched to natural science, as well as having attended art history lectures by the historian Heinrich Wolfflin.

In 1912, Naum Gabo transferred to an engineering school in Munich, where he discovered abstract art and met the noted painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Naum Gabo moved back to Russia in 1917, to become involved in politics and art, spending five years in Moscow with his brother Antoine.

Naum Gabo contributed to the Agit-prop open air exhibitions and taught at 'VKhUTEMAS' the Higher Art and Technical Workshop, with Tatlin, Kandinsky and Rodchenko.

In Germany Naum Gabo came into contact with the artists of the de Stijl and taught at the Bauhaus in 1928.

Naum Gabo visited London in 1935, and settled in 1936, where he found a "spirit of optimism and sympathy for his position as an abstract artist".

Naum Gabo's influence was important to the development of modernism within St Ives, and it can be seen most conspicuously in the paintings and constructions of John Wells and Peter Lanyon, both of whom developed a softer more pastoral form of Constructivism.

Naum Gabo died in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1977 and his wife in 1993.

The essence of Naum Gabo's art was the exploration of space, which he believed could be done without having to depict mass.

Just before the onset of the First World War in 1914, Naum Gabo discovered contemporary art, by reading Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which asserted the principles of abstract art.

Naum Gabo's sculptures initiate a connection between what is tangible and intangible, between what is simplistic in its reality and the unlimited possibilities of intuitive imagination.

Imaginative as Naum Gabo was, his practicality lent itself to the conception and production of his works.

Naum Gabo devised systems of construction which were not only used for his elegantly elaborate sculptures but were viable for architecture as well.

Naum Gabo was innovative in his works, using a wide variety of materials including the earliest plastics, fishing line, bronze, sheets of Perspex, and boulders.

Naum Gabo wrote his Realistic Manifesto, in which he ascribed his philosophy for his constructive art and his joy at the opportunities opened up by the Russian Revolution.

Naum Gabo saw the Revolution as the beginning of a renewal of human values.

Naum Gabo had lived through a revolution and two world wars; he was Jewish and had fled Nazi Germany.

Naum Gabo chose to look past all that was dark in his life, creating sculptures that though fragile are balanced so as to give us a sense of the constructions delicately holding turmoil at bay.

Naum Gabo began printmaking in 1950, when he was persuaded to try out the medium by William Ivins, a former curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Naum Gabo's first print was a wood engraving in a section of wood taken from a piece of furniture and printed onto a piece of toilet paper.

Naum Gabo went on to produce a significant and varied body of graphic work, including much more elaborate and lyrical compositions, until his death in 1977.

Naum Gabo pioneered the use of plastics, such as cellulose acetate, in his sculptures.