Invisible Art?

The 20th century has seen almost everything in the way of abstract sculptures, from huge sheets of hammered copper to tiny, tinkling aluminum mobiles. But Naum Gabo, a 62-year-old Russian, is the first sculptor to make his work almost invisible. Last week a syth Street gallery showed a few of his sculptures, mostly pieces of transparent plastic put together in sharp angles and looping curves to form abstractions as still and shiny--and about as warming--as winter sunlight.

Gabo's method is called "constructivism," and he has been at it for almost half a century. He began in 1915, by taking flat wooden pieces and assembling them to form a portrait head. Says he: "I saw that I could make a head without chipping from a block or using clay to form a mask." The simplicity of the idea appealed to Gabo. Gradually he and a group of friends worked out a new art movement, putting together simple, geometric shapes--squares, circles and ellipses --into more or less complex, graceful structures.

For a while after the Russian Revolution, Gabo & Co. were the darlings of the Bolsheviks. Gabo went to work designing an ultramodern radio station. But one day in 1921, says Gabo, "all the studios were closed by the government, and we were forced out." Gabo went to Berlin. In a 1931 international competition, he entered plans for a new Palace of the Soviets which looked like an immense butterfly. They were rejected: by then, the Communist line had switched from ultramodern to ultra-stodgy art, and the butterfly was less appropriate than the old Russian bear. Gabo was through with Moscow, and vice versa.

Since then, Gabo has lived in France, Britain and (from 1946) the U.S. Here hgi.has slowly built up a following among critics and collectors. Over the years he has produced about 100 sculptures, spent as long as ten years on some. The results, as shown last week, bear such titles as

Torsion, Crystallic Image, Construction in Space with Crystal Center. With their bridges and platforms, their delicate plastic cutouts, their gleaming spider webs of plastic thread, they tend to look like the inner ears of a robot or like railway stations in some suburb on Mars.

Gallerygoers find Gabo's work interesting, even brilliant, but many complain that it is artificial. Gabo insists that his art is not at all artificial. He tries to bring out basic shapes that are hidden in nature's creations, and perhaps seen only by his eye. Living quietly in Connecticut, he gets his ideas from the scene around him. Says he: "I see them in a torn piece of cloud, a green thicket, or the trail of smoke from a passing train." What is Sculptor Gabo trying to say with his strange shapes? "I am trying to tell the world in this frustrated time of ours that there is beauty in spite of all the ugliness and horror. I am trying to ... call attention to the constructive, not the destructive, to the balanced side of life and not the chaotic."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.