Gabo, Naum

Gabo, Naum noum gäˈbō [key], 1890–1977, Russian sculptor, architect, theorist, and teacher, brother of Antoine Pevsner. Gabo lived in Munich and Norway until the end of the revolution, when he returned to Russia. With Pevsner he wrote the Realist Manifesto (1920), which proposed that new concepts of time and space be incorporated into works of art and that dynamic form replace static mass. His sculptural experiments with constructivism, a movement he helped found, were often transparent, geometrical abstractions composed of plastics and other materials. Gabo's art conflicted with Soviet art directives. In 1922 he left Moscow for Berlin where he taught at the Bauhaus, later moving to England and then to the United States. In 1957 he executed a huge public monument in Rotterdam.

See his Gabo (1957) and Of Divers Arts (1962); study by R. Olson and A. Chanin (1948).

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