Inspired by sunbeams and falling stars
Naum Gabo
Tate St Ives ★★★★★
It’s a century since the Russian-born artist Naum Gabo (1890-1977) hoodwinked the Soviet authorities into printing 5,000 posters outlining his avant-garde “Realistic Manifesto”, which he promptly pasted along the boulevards of postrevolutionary Moscow. Whether ordinary citizens paid much attention to this forbidding block of dense and declamatory text (which laid out his theories of artistic expression through five fundamental principles) is not known. Only three copies survive, including Gabo’s personal impression – on display in a new exhibition at Tate St Ives, the first major Gabo show in Britain for more than 30 years.
By the publication of the manifesto, Gabo had already conceived Standing
Wave (1919-20), a curious gadget-cumsculpture, also on display in the first gallery of Tate’s show. A hidden motor causes a slender metal rod to oscillate so speedily that it appears to create a shadowy abstract form materialising like ectoplasm before our eyes. A pleasing plaything, activated by the push of a button, it is also, possibly, the first “kinetic” work in the history of art. In a sense, all of Gabo’s subsequent art flows from this one piece.
Gabo – who, during a peripatetic life, passed the Second World War in a bungalow near St Ives – is routinely described as “visionary”. Certainly, many of his sculptures, constructed using newfangled materials, such as Perspex and nylon, have a sleek, futuristic, sci-fi vibe (which, inevitably, now feels retro and modishly of its time). He trained as an engineer, and always kept up with the latest scientific developments. Crystallography, for instance, influenced his later sculptures.
Some of the drawings at Tate for starry-eyed, unrealised architectural projects even have a Leonardesque quality, with their cramped annotations and obsessive interest in flying machines. A maquette for an abstract public sculpture unveiled outside a department store in Rotterdam in 1957 reminded me of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings, with its organ-like inner forms, like a pair of beating hearts, revealed by the splayed curves of the steel-ribbed outer structure, to which they are attached as if with tendons.
It would be a mistake to pigeonhole Gabo as Modernism’s mad professor, striving for a utopian future in which art would reconnect with real life, since this would distract from a much-warranted, if old-fashioned, aesthetic appreciation of his art. After all, this 20th-century Renaissance
A shadowy abstract form appears to materialise like ectoplasm before our very eyes
man, who found inspiration for his forms in sunbeams and falling stars, wrote poetry throughout his life. And, at their best, Gabo’s sculptures (his paintings are, generally, forgettable) are blessed with a distinctive visual poetry, characterised by refinement, elegance, and poise.
For instance, Linear Construction in Space No2 (c 1949-76) consists of translucent nylon threads carefully wound round a sinuous transparent plastic core – sculpture, if you like, from the inside out. It offers a platonic ideal of modern art: radiant, delicate, shimmering and seemingly immaterial, as, suspended from the ceiling, it levitates and gently sways. No wonder that, at the time, Gabo’s work was likened to celestial instruments: it’s beautiful. Here was an artist attuned to the music of the spheres.
Until May 3. Information: 01736 796 226; tate.org.uk