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Dimensions: measurements height: 8 in. alternate measurements 20.3 cm
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Provenance: Studio of the artist (until at least 1948)(probably) Owen FranklinWinifred Dacre Nicholson (wife of Ben Nicholson)Harold Diamond, New YorkRose Fried Gallery, New YorkHerbert & Nannette Rothschild, New York (by 1958)Judith Rothschild, New York (by descent from the above)
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Literature: "Gabo and Pevsner and Constructive Realism," XXe Siècle, Paris, 1939, no. 5/6, illustrated p. 46 (as dating from 1938)Hebert Read & Leslie Martin, Naum Gabo, Switzerland, 1961, illustrated pl. 50
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE FOUNDATION
The Russian artist Naum Gabo (born Naum Pevsner) sought to incorporate elements of time, space and movement within his sculpture. The present work from 1933 exemplifies this aesthetic pursuit with its interplay of lines and rhythmic dimension. Having studied medicine, engineering and natural sciences in Munich before World War I and encounternig Cubism in Paris in 1912-13, Gabo based his art on principles of physics and translated them into avant-garde compositions. Gabo returned to Russia in 1913, where he and his brother Antoine Pevsner formed an association with a group of progressive architects, engineers and artists. The tenets of Gabo's artistic beliefs were stated in his 'Realistic Manifesto,' which he wrote in 1920 and posted at an exhibition in Moscow at the time. In that treatise, Gabo proclaimed, "the elements of art have their basis in a dynamic rhythm," and this was the guiding principle throughout his career. "The artist's spirit will survive if he acquires the capacity for universalism. This means that the person behind the work must disappear," Gabo once said about his art. "I don't want people to see Gabo behind my work. I want them to see just the work. What I am driving at is to make the work an image, so that the image itself should be distinct for the beholder, for whoever sees it. It should be so organic that you forget the person responsible for it" (quoted in Studio International, April 1966, p. 130). Writing about Construction: Stone with a Collar in the 1997 exhibition catalogue, Innis H. Shoemaker has remarked that this sculpture "typifies Gabo's central concern in the 1930s with the interplay of flowing linear rhythms rather than transparent planes of his earlier works. The merging lines and shapes of stone, slate, and plastic produce a sense of continuous movement held in perfect balance" (I.H. Shoemaker, op. cit., p. 146).
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