Arts and Letters

Naum Gabo’s death in August 1977, at the age of eighty-seven, was such an end as every artist might long to have. That year when he lay dying crowned his career as a Constructivist sculptor in the formal opening of the fountain he had designed for St. Thomas's Hospital in London—a work perfectly set in an open pleasance that commands the Thames and the Houses of Parliament beyond. This fountain in its play of revolving metal and wing-like sprays of falling water bears testimony to Gabo's imaginative resourcefulness in transmuting the scientific abstractions and technical constructions which identify the present age into the liberated images of art. No artist since Leonardo has been more at home in both worlds.

As a young Russian, Gabo had spent his student years in Munich and Norway, at first protected from the ordeals of war, and even encouraged, through his very isolation as an exile, to cultivate ideas and images that were spontaneously floating in his own mind. When Gabo returned to Moscow in 1917, he experienced at first hand the terrible realities Marinetti had exalted as the very mark of Futurist art. Yet Gabo nonetheless held fast to the high utopian hopes that the Russian Revolution at first ignited; the belief that Western civilization was now on the point of a benign transformation of all its obsolete, life-thwarting institutions. That confidence was shared by people of all classes, temperaments, and parties, not least by intellectuals like Boris Pasternak and Naum Gabo. And in his now historic Manifesto of 1920, Gabo, speaking for an ad hoc group of artists and teachers, officially tolerated but not sponsored by the Soviet government, proclaimed his faith in a radically new order, and sought to define its promise for both life and art.

Even before laying down the principles of Constructivist esthetics, Gabo, in his own first experiments in art, was going through an esthetic revolution of his own. As early as 1916, he began experimenting with new materials for creating three-dimensional forms: forms no longer based on solid wood or stone or clay, but airily fabricated by the interplay of metallic or plastic surfaces which were transformed by light and shadows into a woman's head; a head that at certain angles turns into a serene medieval Pietà. Though Gabo never developed this series of images further, it has been deservedly singled out as a landmark in modern art, for Gabo had modelled space and motion instead of solid objects. This was not a trick of representation; it reflected a radical transformation then taking place in the modern mind.

Earlier than most scientists before 1940, Gabo's art recognized the radical importance of constructing new bridges between remote cosmic processes and immediate organic transformations; for in the human mind, every part of the world was either potentially or actually alive; and in that mind both the future and the past played a formative part in the dynamic present. For Gabo every image floating in the human mind was derived from life and was in fact alive. Gabo's Constructivist principles, then, were both a reaction to the disorder of a disintegrating society and an attempt to lay an ideal basis in art for a more general integration of science, art, and life.

Unfortunately for Gabo's high expectations, both the scientific and the political revolutions were betrayed during the next half century. In Soviet Russia, the new Commissars of Communism restored the brutal methods of the Czarist autocracy, implacably suppressing any idea that might challenge and undermine their authority. For the Russian artist, only two choices were left; either slow suicide or migration. Inevitably Gabo, after 1921, chose to become an exile, first in an equally chaotic Germany, then in wartime England, and finally after 1946 in the United States. This hiatus partly accounts for the fact that Gabo's Constructivist doctrine never became the universal movement he had anticipated.

Despite Gabo's world fame at present, many critics and scholars underrate Gabo's qualifications for a place on the highest level of twentieth-century art. But I have a more favorable judgment on both the man and his work. I regard Gabo as one of the few unmistakably original minds of our period: a mind at home in every sphere of the human spirit, who might have been a poet, a philosopher, an architect, or a scientist. All these potentialities are in fact present even in his written work. For confirmation, read—and re-read—his Mellon Lectures entitled: "Of Divers Arts." Characteristically Gabo's final expression as an artist only a few days before his death was a poem in Russian on his love of life and his feeling about his own imminent departure.

The outstanding feature of Gabo's entire work is its unity, marked in his effort to express the endless potentialities of the human mind by restricting his expression in every medium—whether plastic or metal constructions, carved stone, drawings or etchings or paintings—to non-organic forms comparable in their abstraction to the native languages of advanced science and technics. Yet from first to last Gabo's work centers on the theme that pervades all his thinking: the illimitable creativity of the human mind, as the ultimate manifestation on earth of the entire evolutionary process. In Gabo's art this central theme is stated with the geometric clarity and immutability of a Platonic idea.

Gabo's Platonism, if I am right, may be interpreted—as indeed one may also interpret Plato's Myth of the Cave—as a profound reaction against the political disorders and esthetic confusions of Western civilization, since the outbreak of the First World War. As a result, his art is purified by a rigorous method which governs his entire creative process. On Gabo's own admission, each work first comes forth as an inchoate image which in his mind becomes organized and executed in detail line by line, plane by plane, material by material, as a living form. In Gabo's mind alone does the essential creative act take place. When finished there the real work is done. What follows is largely a mechanical process, like the translation of sketches, calculations, and working drawings into a computer or a space-ship.

The inner consistency of Gabo's art, which reflects the integrity of his whole life, has been the needed moral counterpoise to the succession of mindless postures and impostures that, for half a century, has been vulgarly interpreted as authentic modern art. The very steadfastness of Gabo's adhesion to Constructivism has made visible what has been most lacking in modern art: a consistent and intelligible and ultimately rational response to the dissolute dynamism of our age. All of Gabo's many inventions lie strictly within the framework of Constructivism. That inner integrity made him immune to any temptation to conform to current changes of style. "If this is modern art," Gabo once said, pointing to facsimiles of a Campbell's soup can (Warhol) and an American flag (Jasper Johns), "I never was a modern artist."

The moral integrity of Gabo's mind and art makes visible his most enduring contribution: his devotion to the ideal activities of the human mind. His art says what the poet Robinson Jeffers once wrote: "Corruption never was compulsory." In practice Gabo left open to other minds, and other generations, the freedom of expression that his too faithful adherence to the canons of Constructivism would seem to deny: for he repeatedly has affirmed that every work of art, as it leaves the artist's hands, is unfinished and incomplete. Hence only through its perception and assimilation by other minds, from generation to generation, can its full nature be realized. Thus by the very restrictions Naum Gabo placed upon Constructivist art, he brought back to all contemporary activity the very qualities of rationality and continence and inner social coherence that have been lacking, indeed deliberately annihilated, in the insensate fashions of our age. To Gabo's choice of Platonic abstractions, Goethe's maxim perfectly applies: "By his restrictions, the Master first reveals himself." Gabo's example has helped to re-establish the autonomous creativity of the human mind.

Once the ideal motives of Gabo's Constructivism are sympathetically understood, one can appreciate all the ways in which the living man himself transcended its limitations. Born in Briansk, Russia, in 1890, Gabo remained attached, not alone to his native language and literature, but to seemingly remote areas of Russian art, like the carved or painted icons of the Medieval Russian Orthodox Church. In his Mellon Lectures, Gabo even expressed his debt to a nineteenth-century Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel, for opening the eyes of his generation to the Post-Impressionists of Western Europe. However austere Gabo's constructions were, the intense color of many of his later paintings spoke the language of the emotions. In fact, the tender feelings, the volcanic passions, the demonic impulses that he rigorously exiled from Constructivist art were always ready to come forth in daily intercourse.

Let me close with a single example of Gabo's inner freedom. One day he spied on my desk a small fragment of fluted marble, a chip off a Parthenon column a Greek scholar had brought to me. This stone awakened such a desire to leave his own imprint on its classic surface that he asked me to lend it to him. After a while, however, he gave the specimen back, regretfully, almost apologetically. By his repeated handling of it, he told me, he found that this fragment had become alive; it was still too evocative of its Attic past to be desecrated with his chisel. There, in a single flash, one has not just the sculptor but the whole man, the great spirit whose life and work we honor today. So we pass his life on to future generations, trusting that they will complete, through their own experiences and creative acts, the works that he left for them to finish.