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Provenance: Sir Leslie and Lady Martin (a gift from the artist).
Thence by descent to the present owner.

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Exhibited: Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (on loan).
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Circle of Friends : Leslie & Sadie Martin and British Modernism from the 1930's, 2001 (illustrated)

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Literature: Steven A.Nash and Jörn Merkert, Naum Gabo, Munich 1986, p.273, no.81, (illustrated)

While the concepts of space and volume in sculpture remained at the centre of Naum Gabo's avant-garde creations of perspex and transparent structures, the artist equally pursued a lifelong interest in carving from the traditional and most natural medium of stone. Gabo's earliest stone work dates back to 1933, when he had arrived in Paris from Nazi Germany. Stone with Collar shows Gabo's work in transition, as he associates two solids elements (Portland and black slate) with the opaque plastic and painted metal pieces for the collar itself. A more investigative approach to pure carving appears to have been prompted by a commission from the painter Winifred Nicholson following Gabo's arrival in Britain in March 1936 - Kinetic Stone Carving is Gabo's first entirely carved work. The same year, Gabo was introduced to Leslie Martin at the opening of the Abstract and Concrete exhibition held at the Lefevre Gallery in London. This meeting was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the Russian-born artist and one of Britain's most distinguished architects of the twentieth century. In 1937, together with Ben Nicholson, Gabo and Martin co-edited the first and only issue of Circle, a collection of essays, images and designs on contemporary constructive art and architecture (re-issued in 1971). This concise publication, which gathered articles by some of the leading architects, artists, and writers of the time - Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, Herbert Read among others - , revealed the extent of the British contribution to the European abstract movement.

During these productive years in Britain, Gabo began his own collection of natural objects found along the beach, in the manner of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, with whom he was always in close contact. This large collection followed him to the United States, where he moved in November 1946. It was only much later, in 1963, that Leslie Martin visited Gabo in America and told him about the Portuguese quarries he had recently discovered. Prompted by this new source, Gabo made regular trips to Portugal, where Leslie Martin and his wife Sadie had a holiday house. The present stone was probably collected from a beach along the Portuguese coast. A photograph dating around 1967 shows Gabo carving the stone outside the Martins' house.

It is significant to understand Gabo's work with stone within the artist's own register of ideas on abstract sculpture:

"My idea of space affects everything; that's why I continue to carve in stone. I want to show that in our consciousness we are all transparent, space penetrates everything. Your eyes can't penetrate the stone, but by following the contours on the surface I want your consciousness to become aware of the interior spaces and dynamic forces."
"Naum Gabo: 'Space is Not Outside Us'", The Times, 15 March 1966).