Plumbing the Space Age

"I am always called a 'constructivist,' " says Naum Gabo, now 75, "as if I were a kind of pedantic engineer on the borders of art." As a dazzling year-long European retrospective of Gabo's sculptures, drawings and paintings drew to a close in London last week, it was doubtful that constructivist would ever again carry that connotation. In a chorus of approbation, critics have proclaimed that Gabo is anything but a pedantic engineer. In fact, as the founder of constructivism, he ranks as one of the innovators of 20th century art.

What has surprised public and critics alike is how familiar the exhibition looks, not because Gabo's work is familiar--it has rarely received such a substantial showing--but because of the pervasive influence his ideas have had on young moderns, particularly kinetic and op artists. Gabo's fragile spatial constructions, in their crisp, cool elegance, impersonal statement, exacting craftsmanship and knowing use of synthetic materials, evince all the artistic values so esteemed today--but they go back 50 years.

White Nights. Being way out in front of everyone else is nothing new to Gabo, whose real name was Naum Neemia Pevsner. His brother Alexei Pevsner, a Soviet scientist, recalls that the family in the remote Russian town of Briansk always said of Naum: "He does not go through the streets but over the rooftops." The question was on what rooftop he would finally perch. Sent abroad to study in Munich in 1910, Naum switched from medicine to the natural sciences, to engineering, finally decided on sculpture.

When war broke out between Czarist Russia and Germany in 1914, Gabo sought refuge in neutral Norway, accompanied by Alexei and a third brother, the cubist painter Antoine Pevsner. It was there, according to Alexei, that constructivism was born. "During walks along the shores of the fjords and in the mountains, both by day and during the white nights," he has recalled, Gabo returned again and again to "questions of space and time and to a search for means of expressing them." He soon found it. In 1915 he constructed a head from intersecting planes of colored cardboard, later translated it into plywood, sheet metal and plastic.

It was an experiment that renounced many of the canons of sculpture up to that date. What it amounted to, as Gabo later wrote in his Realistic Manifesto, published in 1920 after his return to Moscow, was a rejection of sculpture as mass in favor of an expression of "continuous depth," as more befitting what was soon to become the space age. "With the plumb line in our hand, eyes as precise as a ruler, in a spirit as taut as a compass," he affirmed "kinetic rhythms as the basic forms of our perception of real time."

Beauty, not Horror. His Russian contemporaries were fascinated by his ideas, and Gabo even undertook a project for a radio station for the government. The honeymoon between the Bolsheviks and the avant-garde was brief. Soon he was on the move again, to Berlin, to Paris and then London, where he edited a book, Circle, with Painter Ben Nicholson and Architect Sir Leslie Martin, and finally to the U.S., where he still works diligently in a quiet studio in Middlebury, Conn.

Gabo's sculptures are frequently made from translucent plastic, phosphor bronze or glass; the shape is usually a swooping arc, strung with taut wire or string, like a harp, that forms a delicate open-sided cage for space. Their construction has been likened to architecture, their humming strings to music, their balance to mathematics.

But Gabo does not like them to be called abstract, says: "They don't belong to an ideal world of concepts and mathematical calculations." Far from a turning away from nature, he feels that his work seeks to penetrate if more profoundly. "I am trying," he says, "to tell the world in this frustrated time of ours that there is beauty in spite of ugliness and horror. I am trying to call attention to the balanced, not the chaotic side of life--to be constructive, not destructive."

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