"Naum Gabo: Pioneer of Abstract Sculpture" at PaceWildenstein.

"Naum Gabo: Pioneer of Abstract Sculpture" at PaceWildenstein, New York. November 4-January 8, 1999

Naum Gabo (1890-1977) possessed an astonishing consistency of vision. Nothing in the design of his complex sculpture Column (1975), in which two tall, rectangular intersecting glass panels stand in the center of a number of stainless steel and plexiglass circles, indicates that the artist made it some fifty years after, say, Construct/on in Space with Balance on Two Points (1924-5), a group of intersecting square and rectilinear plexiglass planes held aloft in the center of a bisected plexiglass semicircle. From his first constructions of 1915 until his death, Gabo remained committed to working within the Constructivist aesthetic he helped establish.

He was born Naum Neemia Borisovich Pevsner in 1890, and changed his name to Gabo in 1915 to avoid confusion with his brother Antoine Pevsner. Together they penned the Realistic Manifesto, a Constructivist document advocating pure abstract sculpture, but which rejected the Soviet aesthetic program. Unwilling to abandon traditional artistic modes for industrial design or Socialist Realism, the brothers fled the Soviet Union. Gabo lived in Berlin, Paris, and England before permanently settling in the United States in 1946. Two years later the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition of his and Pevsner's respective work. "Naum Gabo: Pioneer of Abstract Sculpture" PaceWildenstein's thorough and intoxicating exhibit, is Gabo's first in an American gallery since 1953, although the Dallas Museum of Art originated a large retrospective in 1985.

In addition to its eleven sculptures, the show includes several graceful drawings, used as studies for sculptural projects, as well as three surprisingly satisfying paintings, in which the sculptor turns his attention to colon Green Painting (Ireland) borrows its hues from the Irish countryside and its angular form from the futurisms of Gabo's youth. The pulsing yellows in Strontium (1945) inevitably call to mind that era's nuclear experiments, to which Gabo would have been well attuned, having been trained as a scientist and engineer.

Of course, it is the sculpture that holds center stage here. Gabo was among the first artists to employ industrial materials--glass, plastic, and galvanized steel--though he worked on occasion with traditional materials like stone and bronze, too. In his poised, curvilinear constructions, he frequently interrupted, filled, or striated negative space with steel wire, or gave positive form to space with transparent matter such as plexiglass. Vertical Construction No. 2 (1969-70), a tall, attenuated three-dimensional diamond in stainless steel and spring-wire, illustrates Gabo's abiding interest in vortices, torsion, and the interplay of energy and solidity. The piece stands on a motorized base. In fact, Gabo was a pioneer of kinetic sculpture: his Kinetic Sculpture (Standing Wave) (1919-20, Tate Gallery) is arguably the first such work.

The show's oldest piece, Constructed Head No. 2 (1916), existed only as a small-scale model until 1975, when the artist completed an enormous stainless steel version of this Cubist-inspired head of a woman. One of a series of early heads, the sculpture demonstrates an affection for sharp angles that virtually disappears from Gabo's later curved and biomorphic forms. A similarly cubistic head, this time made of cardboard for a corner niche, Constructed Head No. 3 (1917), was flattened and smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1968 by Gabo's brother Alexei. Only recently reconstructed, it wasn't even included in the catalogue raisonne that was assembled for the Dallas Museum retrospective.

Gabo's was an intensely elegant sensibility, devoted to manifesting alary and tensile shapes which, despite his engineering background and purposeful manifestoes, verge on the decorative. PaceWildenstein's show proves the desirability of seeing Naum Gabo's work in galleries more often than once every forty-four years.

Daniel Kunitz is the managing editor of The Paris Review.