Naum Gabo (1890β1977) possessed an astonishing consistency of vision. Nothing in the design of his complex sculpture Column (1975), in which two tall, rectangular intersecting glass panels stand in the center of a number of stainless steel and plexiglass circles, indicates that the artist made it some fifty years after, say, Construction in Space with Balance on Two Points (1924β5), a group of intersecting square and rectilinear plexiglass planes held aloft in the center of a bisected plexiglass semicircle. From his first constructions of 1915 until his death, Gabo remained committed to working within the Constructivist aesthetic he helped establish.
He was born Naum Neemia Borisovich Pevsner in 1890, and changed his name to Gabo in 1915 to avoid confusion with his brother Antoine Pevsner. Together they penned the Realistic Manifesto, a Constructivist document advocating pure abstract sculpture, but which rejected the Soviet aesthetic program. Unwilling to abandon traditional artistic modes for industrial design or Socialist Realism, the brothers fled the Soviet Union. Gabo lived in Berlin, Paris, and England before permanently settling in the United States in 1946. Two years later the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition of his and Pevsnerβs respective work. βNaum Gabo: Pioneer of Abstract Sculpture,β PaceWildensteinβs thorough and intoxicating exhibit, is Gaboβs first in an American gallery since 1953, although the Dallas Museum of Art originated a large retrospective in 1985.
In addition to its eleven sculptures, the show includes several graceful drawings, used as studies for sculptural projects,