Word: gabo
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This deep hostility to modernism, a permanent legacy of Stalin, seems especially ironic to Western eyes because it was in Russia, between 1910 and 1925, that one of the great experiments of modern art was carried out. The leaders of the avantgarde, among them Kasimir Malevich, Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, wanted to serve the new power of the left by combining revolutionary art with revolutionary politics. Russian constructivism was, in fact, the only heroic modernist style that drew its strength from the revolutionary impetus. Yet its sin was in being abstract, and for that...
...modernist spirit that is still not fully known about. This was partly due to the cold war. The main reason, however, was repression inside the Soviet Union. The work of artists like Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, Natalya Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Vladimir Tallin, Kasimir Malevich, Natan Altman, Naum Gabo and scores of others was a collectively ecstatic response to the possibilities of a new world, the Utopia that Lenin called "Marx plus electricity." It was international in range, drawing on the resources of the new movements in Italy and France-futurism and cubism-which the Soviet artists absorbed with...
...repression had begun. In Stalin's slow and terrible eye, such art was decadent and, because of its internationalism, bourgeois-formalist. The Gulag swallowed some artists, like Boris Kushner. Others, such as Larionov, Goncharova, Gabo and Ivan Puni, went into exile. Those who stayed, like Rodchenko or the architect Konstantin Melnikov, survived as ghosts, forgotten men in a culture of vindictive Stalinist toadies. Like Cronus, the Revolution devoured its children. As a wholesale trashing of a civilization, only Hitler's demolition of the German modernists compares with it. Inside the Soviet Union, the works themselves lay buried, invisible...
...futurist sculpture of Italian artists like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla to the radical experiments of the Russian constructivists, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Puni; from Alexander Archipenko's wall reliefs to Julio Gonzalez's iron constructions and Alexander Calder's fluttering mobiles. Artists as unlike as Naum Gabo and David Smith were affected by it. No sculptor interested in either ideal formal systems or new materials was immune to its promises, and its influence persists to this day. Sculpture had been solid since paleolithic man made his fertility dolls, indeed since God made Adam out of clay...
DIED. Naum Gabo, 87, Russian-born sculptor who founded constructivism, one of the most innovative movements in 20th century art; of cancer; in Waterbury, Conn. Gabo studied medicine and engineering in pre-World War I Germany while, at the same time, painting and sculpting. In 1920 he wrote Realistic Manifesto, which outlined the principles he was to espouse, rejecting sculpture as mass and calling for the use of space as a structural part of the object. After working in England (1935-46), Gabo moved to the U. S. and in 1952 became an American citizen. He created a dazzling, airy...