Naum Gabo: Dances in Space

Some time between 1941 and 1946, whilst living in Cornwall alongside artists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo made for his daughter Nina a tiny, exquisite ‘toy’.

Under a plastic dome roughly the size of a dinner plate were placed, one by one, a series of figurative and abstract shapes. First, the tiny figure of a man (not much more than a stick figure – a circle for the head, oblongs of different sizes for the arms and legs and a small, linear body), one side blue, the other red. Second, a pair of tiny Japanese paper lanterns – one gold, one blue – followed by a whole company of other fragile, fragmentary shapes: a slither of silver foil, an arc of bronze paper, an elegant orbital structure of two interconnecting gold circles, and the most fragile of the lot, a piece of taupe tissue paper: the ‘queen’.

These pieces were all off-cuts of one kind or another, humble materials made magical by the hand of Naum Gabo and a simple, scientific trick: when the dome was rubbed with a piece of fabric, the pieces inside, charged with static electricity, became animated – their frenzied leaps and sudden staccato paper-arabesques creating a magnificent performance on a tiny stage.

This ‘toy’ was Gabo’s ‘Constructivist Ballet’.

Not long before this piece was constructed Gabo had had the chance to work on similar themes on a human scale. In 1926 he was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev (director of the Ballet Russe) to design and produce the sets and costumes for his new, avant-garde ballet ‘La Chatte’. The story was one from Aesop’s fables, rewritten for Diaghilev by his long-time collaborator Boris Kochno. In it, a young man falls in love with a cat and prays to Aphrodite to transform her into a human being. The goddess obliges, but tests the transformed woman’s love for the young man by conjuring a mouse to tempt her. When the woman abandons her lover to pursue the mouse, she is transformed back into the form of a cat, and the young man dies of a broken heart. The set was praised highly by one contemporary reviewer:

The scene shone with exotic simplicity. From its base of geometrical logic had emerged a fantasy as shimmering and evanescent as any mirage of the Arabian desert. A group of quadrilateral planes filled the right side of the stage, with one large disc in a curve balustrade, and all of them were made of talc[1]. Behind them were two round windows in black shrine, in one of which was the cat, and towering above it was a diamond-shaped form that symbolised the goddess. The walls and the floor were shimmering black, and the floor was so polished that no one could dance on it securely until it had been liberally dusted with sand. It was a suitably remorseless setting for the double tragedy that was impending[2].

At one point during the performance, the choreography called for the dancers – clad in luminous plastic – to creep across the floor carrying large, geometric shapes: ‘a square, a circle, an ellipse and a trapeze.’[3]

In his ‘Constructivist Ballet’, created for Nina’s amusement, Naum eliminated the human dancers and made the geometric shapes the complete focus of the viewer’s attention. Reading descriptions of the set and studying the few remaining photographs of the performance, it is hard not to feel that in ‘La Chatte’ the human dancers were, to some extent, a means for animating his designs – a stand in for the static electricity that later solved the problem in the ‘Constructivist Ballet’. The lead ballerina of Diaghilev’s ‘La Chatte’, Olga Spessivtseva, seems to have felt something of this kind. Gabo recalled: ‘Diaghilev told her that I was trying to make her in to a work of art. This made her indignant as she thought she was already’. Perhaps unwilling to be upstaged by her costume, Spessivtseva performed in the ballet only once – at the opening in Monte Carlo – and was immediately replaced by Alice Nikitina, who, in turn was replaced by Alice Markova after the former sustained an ‘ankle injury’ (the verity of this injury is questioned by numerous writers on the ballet). The interchangeability of the leading ladies is perhaps testament to the dominance of Gabo’s set.

Naum Gabo found the experience of synchronising movement, light, and music in ‘La Chatte’, inspiring. In 1928 he wrote a speculative letter to Guido Bagier, a filmmaker who had just written a book on film’s current achievements. In his analysis on the current state of film, Bagier had also made predictions and suggestions for where the medium could go in the future. One of his suggestions was for films that focussed entirely on movement and the play of light, a concept that was hugely appealing to Gabo and that chimed with what he had been trying to achieve in the set and costumes for ‘La Chatte’. It is clear from Gabo’s letter that he saw film as a potential means of developing his idea of kinetic sculpture – a thing of perennial importance to artist.

In 1919-20 Gabo had experimented with his first truly kinetic sculpture: ‘Standing Wave’. In this design a strip of metal was forced to oscillate, powered by motors and magnets. The movement of the metal strip in space created the impression of volume. Gabo was frustrated with this attempt to create a kinetic sculpture, especially with the need for a motor, and was at pains to state that the piece succeeded as a demonstration of a theory (a teaching model), but not as a work of art:

When I showed it to the students, I made it emphatically clear that this was done by me in order to show them what I mean by “kinetic rhythms”. This piece is only a basic example of one single movement – nothing more[4].

Despite further discussions with Bagier, the film never materialised. It is possible to see in Gabo’s ‘Constructivist Ballet’ something of what he had been hoping to explore in the film: movement freed from obtrusive mechanics, whether these obtrusions were unwilling ballerinas, or cumbersome motors.

The presence of the ‘king’ – the tiny blue and red stick figure – in Gabo’s constructivist ballet is a point of curiosity. After his early experiments ‘Torso’ and ‘Constructed Head’ of 1916, Gabo eschewed figurative representation altogether. His extreme aversion to figurative representation is demonstrated in the case of the model of the Athene for Diaghilev’s ‘La Chatte’. In a statement published in Herbert Read and Leslie Martin’s book on Gabo in 1957, Gabo is at pains to state that:

The process of working was this; the model of the stage-setting and all the costumes, designs, and accessories presented to Diaghilev, with the exception of the statue of the goddess, were designed and made by [me]. In this first model of the setting the place was left empty and this statue was done by Pevsner. I refused to make any naturalistic sculpture for the ballet as at that time I had already left behind me the period of figurative art and had no wish to return to it.

It is an unfortunate irony that despite his life long ambition to create sculptures on a monumental scale, Gabo is best known for his delicate, luminescent sculptures, not much larger than 40cm sq, mounted on podiums in galleries scattered across the world, and for his miniature models of unrealised projects. In this exhibition we see, for the first time, the full scale of Gabo’s ambition. Gabo was passionate about having his work in places where the general public could access and enjoy it.  His ‘Realist Manifesto’, written in Russia in 1920 to accompany an exhibition in a bandstand in the centre of Moscow, was inspired, undoubtedly, by the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovskii, who, in his publication ‘Order to the Army of Art’, two years before had proclaimed ‘The streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes’. In 1920

Gabo wrote:

In the squares and on the streets we are placing our work, convinced that art must not be a sanctuary for the idle, a consolation for the weary, and a justification for the lazy. Art should attend us everywhere that life flows and acts…at the bench, at the table, at work, at rest, at play; on working days and holidays…at home and on the road… in order that the flame to live should not extinguish in mankind’.

 

Despite leaving Russia in 1921, and finding fault with the more utilitarian and propagandist strain of Russian constructivist thought held by contemporaries such as Vladimir Tatlin, Gabo never abandoned his commitment to the ideas that the best and necessary place for art was public space. The placing of his work remained a point of contention for Gabo throughout his life. In a letter to his friend and critic Herbert Read, in 1944, he expressed his frustration:

Constructive art as a whole, and my work as part of it, has still a long way to go to overcome the atmosphere of controversy that surrounds it. It has been, and still is, deliberately kept from the masses on the grounds that the masses would not understand it, and that it is not the kind of art that the masses need. It is always difficult to argue with anybody on such obscure grounds as this; the simplest and fairest thing to do would be to allow the masses to make their own judgement about this art. I am prepared to challenge any of the representatives of public opinion and put at their disposal any work of mine they chose to be placed where it belongs – namely, where the masses come and go and live and work. I would submit to any judgement the masses would freely pronounce about it…. Mean time I can do nothing but leave my work to the few and selected ones to judge and discriminate.

It was in the 1950s, while living with his young family in Connecticut, that Gabo finally got the chance to see some of his work executed on a large scale. This was due in part to the reputation that Gabo had worked hard to build in America, but also to a general increase in acceptance or abstractionism in America at this time. The early 1950s was also the time that his friend and contemporary Henry Moore began to be commissioned for large-scale public sculpture. His ‘Screen’ for the Time/Life building was commissioned in 1952.

The first piece of work that Gabo was ever able to realise on a large scale, and place in a public setting, was a commission for the Baltimore museum of Modern Art. A rich client of Gabo’s, Sadie May, was donating money to the museum for a new children’s art wing, and approached Gabo to produce something very specific for the space:

 We wish to discuss your making a type of suspended construction to hang in the new Museum, above the stairwell, attached to the ceiling. The proportions of the well is 8 feet by 9 feet in circumference; therefore the construction cannot be wider in rectangular shape than 3 feet by 4 feet, to avoid being handled by children and grownup people as they ascend or descend the stairs…The construction must be able to be viewed from the first floor level as well as from the second floor level. The idea is to eliminate the intermediate space above the elevator well.

 

Excited by the prospect of finally being funded to create something on a large-scale for a (relatively) public setting, Gabo accepted the challenge. He signed the contract in 1950 and, as usual, wrote to Herbert Read about his aesthetic and practical decisions for the design. In the letter he discusses the fact that the museum had initially requested a kinetic sculpture, and explains how he developed their proposal. Never directly referenced, but obviously on Gabo’s mind, is a kinetic sculpture that Alexander Calder had made for a museum in New York. This moving sculpture had caused congestion on the stairwell, as people on the stairs stopped to see what different forms the sculpture took as it rotated. Gabo wanted to ensure that his sculpture worked with the way that people used the stairs, rather than against it, demonstrating, as usual, an approach to creativity that was technical, practical, and informed by engineering.

 I proposed…that the work should be so constructed that the observer, by reason of his own motion, should have the impression of a turning motion in the construction.

He elucidates his comments in an article for The Magazine of Art in 1952:

 In effect, the spiral movement of the ascending or descending spectator, if it is incorporated in the conception of the structure, would give an imaginary movement to the sculpture … Apart from that, I had to take into account the fact that the observer would inevitably be looking at the work not only from a series of points along a horizontal plane, but also from all the points along the vertical axis of the spiral periphery of the stairs as well.

 

The finished piece, constructed entirely by Gabo (rather than outsourced to a local plastics manufacturer, as was his habit with later larger sculptures) was made from aluminium, plastic, gold wire, bronze mesh and steel wire.

The piece consists of two separate structures – one horizontal and one vertical – which, depending on the angles from which they are viewed, appear in very different relationship with one another. The horizontal part of the sculpture is in fact a relief, attached to the ceiling. The second, lower, vertical part of the sculpture is suspended by thin wires attached to the ceiling at an angle of 45 degrees.

Viewed from the bottom of the stairwell, the pieces appear as one. The severe angle contracts the piece into one seemingly 2-D shape, with a more than fleeting resemblance to Gabo’s woodcuts of the same period. From this position the structure resembles a freehand drawing, loose and dynamic, but the supposed freedom of the lines is misleading. This is a structure that has been carefully conceived to create precise impressions from every conceivable angle.

Symmetry seems to be both suggested and subverted in this view from the base of the stairs, reminding me of Gabo’s account of a conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright. Viewing a sculpture of his in New York, Wright had commented to Gabo that his ellipsis was ‘wrong’, to which Gabo replied, ‘I make my own rules’: it was wrong because he wanted it to be. The looping, interconnecting black lines form something like a circle, in the centre of which are two semi-circular shapes formed of a lighter material looping outwards from a central point. Right at the centre of the piece (for there is a centre from this angle), the confluence of two of the lines in the forms a definite cross: a peculiar nucleus for this mal-aligned atomic structure.

When the viewer moves upwards and around the structure on the spiral staircase – forming further, imaginary atomic orbits around this strange nucleus – the two pieces disentangle themselves from one another and become separate structures in space. The visual tangling and untangling of the two sections of the Baltimore structure is reminiscent of the flailing dances of the pieces of paper in Gabo’s ‘Constructivist Ballet’. Animated by the static electricity the separate pieces are drawn together, their paper limbs and extremities linking to create new temporary formations, only to come apart again at the next burst of movement, as dancers in a frenzied duet. I am not alone in considering the movement of the Baltimore structure as a dance. The American architectural critic, and friend of Gabo’s, Lewis Mumford, greatly admired the Baltimore structure, calling it ‘a dance in space’.

In Gabo’s 1940’s ‘toy’ the light, almost weightless pieces of paper are brought to the top of the dome by static electricity. They hang there held by a force invisible to the naked eye, before being once again released. A similar effect is created in the Baltimore structure. Due to the fine wires and thin tubing that attach the relief and the lower, vertical, element to the ceiling it appears to be suspended by an invisible force rather than anything more material.

Gabo specifically avoided any visible suspension mechanisms in his design. He wanted to create an impression not of something dangling, chandelier-like, but something held, ‘suspended in space’. He says:

A thing supported represents a natural phenomenon of the tension of our earth. A thing suspended from the ceiling gives to me the feeling of a room put upside down. There is something unnatural in it and my inner sensibility revolts against it and if this project should be solved satisfactorily, it must give the impression of hovering in the air, yet being above us. It is this which took me so long to solve.

While Gabo’s ‘Constructivist Ballet’ was never intended by the artist to be considered as part of his oeuvre, it never the less embodies the preoccupations of Gabo’s working life: a delight in science and a commitment to its pairing with art; an interest in simple, untraditional, materials; and a fascination with ways of producing movement.

Interviewed by a young journalist in 1953 Gabo was asked the following innocent question: ‘Has there been much change in your constructions? What kind of periods has your work undergone?’. Gabo replied ‘I am not a woman. I do not have periods’. The blushing journalist modestly translated this in print as the distinctly less pithy ‘I am not a chameleon. I do not have periods’, but the point still stands.

Comparing the toy he created in private for his daughter Nina, with other works, we see Gabo striving for the successful realisation of the same problems across different scales, media and decades. He elaborated upon his menstrual comment to the young journalist: ‘I never repeat an older image. My work represents not change, but development. I can comfort myself with the conviction that I never do a piece unless there is something in it which I have not done before’. Gabo’s consistency is not static, then, but dynamic. His work over a 60 year period can be seen as possessing the same curious properties as one of his sculptures: a fixed thing containing, within it, movement.