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Naum Gabo Rediscovered: Revelations on a Constructivist Pioneer” with Stephen Nash, 1986

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Naum Gabo Rediscovered: Revelations on a Constructivist Pioneer” with Stephen Nash, 1986 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Naum Gabo Rediscovered: Revelations on a Constructivist Pioneer” with Stephen Nash, 1986 PART 1 SUSAN HIRSCHFELD [00:11] Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Susan Hirschfeld. I’m assistant curator at the Guggenheim, and I’m delighted to welcome you all here this evening to the second of two lectures being given in conjunction with the Naum Gabo exhibition. I am particularly pleased to introduce tonight’s speaker, Dr. Stephen Nash, who organized the Gabo retrospective and wrote the main catalogue essay. Dr. Nash received his PhD from Stanford University, and wrote his dissertation on the drawings of Jacques-Louis David. Dr. Nash subsequently served on the art history faculties of the University of Delaware and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He served on the staff of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery [00:01:00] in Buffalo from 1973 to 1980 as research curator, chief curator, and then assistant director. In addition to the many lectures and symposia papers he has delivered, Dr. Nash has also written extensively for art journals and publications on such subjects as David, Rodchenko, [Carilli?], and Bonnard. While at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Dr. Nash organized exhibitions on Ben Nicholson, modern European sculpture from 1918 to 1945, and also on constructivism and the geometric tradition in the collection of the McCrory Collection. Since becoming chief curator and deputy director of the Dallas Museum of Art in 1980, Dr. Nash has prepared numerous exhibitions, including a show of Picasso’s graphics, and he was co- organizer of the 1984 exhibition of Pierre Bonnard’s [02:00] Late Paintings. Most recently, Dr. Nash has been working with the Brooklyn Museum on the preview exhibition of Impressionists and nineteenth century Art from the Musée d’Orsay. And Dr. Nash is currently preparing an exhibition of works from the Nasher Collection that will be seen not only in Dallas but at the National Gallery in Washington. Dr. Nash has long been interested in constructivist art, and we are indebted to him for his major contribution in this field. His work on the movement’s founder adds much to our understanding of Gabo and of constructivism. I am pleased to welcome Dr. Nash on this occasion and to introduce his lecture, “Naum Gabo Rediscovered: Revelations on a Constructivist Pioneer.” Thank you. Steve. STEPHEN NASH Thank you very much, Susan. [03:00] I am delighted to be here, delighted the exhibition is here. It’s interesting to see it in these spaces and to think that, as a student in Munich, about 1910, 1911, Gabo became acquainted with Frank Lloyd Wright’s theories, writings on architecture, and that particular experience was something very important in provoking his interest in architecture and architectural writing, a strain in his work which continued throughout most of his life. So these two pioneers now come face to face again in this location. I think it’s a little bit difficult to Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 14 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Naum Gabo Rediscovered: Revelations on a Constructivist Pioneer” with Stephen Nash, 1986 have the last word on Frank Lloyd Wright, but I’m delighted with the installation. I think it looks very fine here. I’m here to share a little bit of behind the scenes information about the exhibition with you. When I started the project, it seemed to me that Gabo represented something of a contradiction in terms. [04:00] He is certainly one of our most famous twentieth century artists, about whom however, basically little is known in terms of the fine details of his development, or at least has been up until this point. He is certainly in all the histories of modern sculpture. He is correctly singled out as the most central connecting link in the long constructivist tradition, from its early heroic years, the morally [driven?] movement in Russia about the time of the revolution, to the German affiliations in the 1920s -- Bauhaus movement, into Paris -- connections with the Abstraction-Création group there, to the English avant-garde during the ’30s and ’40s, finally into the propagation reinterpretation of constructivist principles in post-war America. Gabo has worked through all of these evolutions [05:00] with endurance and with integrity, and stood very much as a symbol of connection with those heroic years of the past. And certainly the main landmarks of his career are well known. I have on the screen here one of the Constructivist Heads from very early 1916, paired with another one of the Heads, Head in a Corner Niche, from 1917. These works have long stood in fact as icons of the constructivist movement. They announced very dramatically in the years 1915 to ’17 principles that would concern Gabo throughout most of his long evolution in fact -- the replacement of solidity and mass in sculpture with elements of light, space, air, movement, and dynamism. On into the tower constructions of about 1921, ’22. A piece at Yale on the left. A large-scale [06:00] reinterpretation that he did late in life of a 1921 column piece, one version of which is in the Guggenheim Museum on the right. These works introduced new materials -- glass, steel, plastics -- into the modern constructivist vocabulary, and they also proposed heroic skeletal structures for outdoor settings, public spaces. On into works from the late ’20s into the ’30s, now in a totally purified constructivist vocabulary, totally clear, transparent, plastic structures, deriving in some cases out of mathematical formulae, in some cases dealing with an attempt on Gabo’s part to crystallize, or give a feeling for, certain perceptions about natural laws, about the curvature of space, about spatial continuity, etc., driven as it were by these types of scientific considerations. The stringing [07:00], then, of course, which is so famous an element of his art, beginning about 1941, ’42, with Linear No. 1 variation on the left and Linear No. 2 on the right. The introduction of the use of these very fine nylon filament lines which add to his plastic structures this new dimension of luminosity, of airiness -- turning real surfaces, solid planes into virtual planes and adding this greater complexity of surface and space folding in upon itself. And finally, the large- scale projects very late in life, some of which, as in the Linear No. 3 With Red on the right, is in this exhibition, continuing on and developing further certain ideas that were prominent in his work during the ’40s and ’50s. And finally, the opportunity to work on a monumental scale in certain cases -- The Bijenkorf Building [08:00] construction in Rotterdam, which allowed Gabo to realize, partially at least, this ambition which was lifelong, to move out of the studio and into the open public spaces. Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 14 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Naum Gabo Rediscovered: Revelations on a Constructivist Pioneer” with Stephen Nash, 1986 At a time when Modernism has suffered so many critical slings and arrows for its supposedly impersonal, cold abstractions, for its propagation of minimalist [excesses?], for its utopian ideology -- sometimes very restrictive, it is somewhat refreshing in fact to find someone who is a totally unrepentant, unreformed Modernist. As old fashioned as it may sound, Gabo believed very much in the communicative powers of abstract art, abstraction is a kind of universal language. He felt it could merge rationality and perception, sensuality, intuition, and feeling, and that it [09:00] could very much enhance and indeed help restructure human life and the human environment. This is what constructive art, with a capital C, meant to Gabo. It was to build, to construct as an engineer constructs, but also to make a positive contribution to real life. As much as Gabo stands out, however, as a symbol and leader of the constructivist tradition, a great deal about his work, as I mentioned before, had remained enigmatic, unknown, subject to romance or confusion. Many important pieces from early in his career had long been thought to be missing, or still are missing in fact. Others have perished because they are made out of such fragile, such volatile materials as some of the early plastics, rhodoid and celluloid. I show you slide of a work on the left, Monument to an Airport, that’s in the Rhode Island School of Design, and you can perhaps see [10:00] how that black plane has buckled and wobbled so severely. This is a fortunate example, because in many cases some of these works that don’t have proper ventilation or are subjected to heat have over the years simply disintegrated, and there’s nothing left of them. There was recently a sculpture [murdered?] at the Wadsworth Atheneum in fact by leaving it in warm storage, and when the case was opened, it was simply a mass, a puddle, of plastic. The work on the right, one of the first column models. You can see the yellowing which has taken place in the plastic, and how volatile and unstable that particular material is. In addition, Gabo lived through very stormy historical times. He had to move a great deal -- Germany, Russia, Germany again, on to Paris, England, United States -- driven by revolution, war, the rise of Nazism, etc. And in all of these moves, with this very difficult to recreate [11:00] background, it leaves a problem for tracing the documentation for various steps in his career.
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