Naum Gabo

Naum Gabo (1890-1977), American sculptor of Russian birth, one of the leading practitioners of 20th-century Constructivism. Born in Klimovichi, Belarus, and originally named Naum Pevsner, he changed his name to avoid confusion with his brother, Antoine Pevsner, also an artist. After being brought up in Bryansk, he studied (1910-1914) medicine and engineering in Munich, but in 1914 took up sculpture, producing Cubist-inspired heads and busts using cut-out sheets of metal, cardboard, or celluloid.

In Moscow from 1917 to 1922, Gabo helped found the Constructivist movement, which advocated the construction of sculpture from industrial materials rather than from traditional carving in stone or casting in bronze. In 1920 he and his brother issued their Realist Manifesto, calling for new art forms based on space and time; in keeping with this theory, Gabo executed several works with moving parts, called kinetic sculpture. He lived in Germany from 1922 to 1932, where he executed works characterized by a monumental architectural quality, as in the glass, metal, and plastic Column (1923, Museum of Modern Art, New York). During World War II, in London, Gabo continued to produce such characteristic works as Linear Construction, Variation (1943, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), in which an oval space is outlined in clear plastic forms that, in turn, are delicately webbed with intersecting planes of nylon thread. In 1946 he settled in the United States. One of Gabo's most notable works is a large-scale, 26-m (85-ft) tree-shaped monument (1957) commissioned for the rebuilt Bijenkorf (Beehive) Department Store in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to commemorate those who perished in 1940 in the Nazi destruction of Rotterdam. His last major work (1976) was a fountain for St Thomas's Hospital, London.