ART
Space in Search of a Site F ever inclined to view with patronage, as we ifrequently are, the severely restricted range of style and content countenanced within the official art circles of the USSR, then our complacency should vanish when the facts are recalled. For in many ways the most profound and radical steps towards a new visual ethos for this cen- tury were taken by the Russians, at a time when Matisse and Picasso were still fighting an in- ventive, but essentially rearguard, action against the final vestiges of nineteenth-century elements. In Russia, on the other hand, Tatlin, Malevitch, Lissitsky, Gabo, Pevsner, and others, were already aiming at an original dynamic, and in varying degrees achieving it.
But history can be read on other occasions and in the meantime Naum Gabo's sculpture at the Tate (until April 15) is a special and highly individual celebration—and richly deserves to be assessed independently. The show is stunning, tactfully installed by the Arts Council and backed up by the intelligent screening and lighting of Michael Brawne. If this seems irrelevant, it must be stressed that masterpieces can be literally wrecked by maladroit lighting, placing and levels, and we are not in this instance dealing with masterpieces. Gabo's sculpture is robust, but highly vulnerable: heavily dependent upon benign conditions of space and light, and the possible flattery of an immaculate context.
Not that work of this kind, demanding these conditions, is necessarily effete or lost without proper stage management. We need only recall that Gabo's immense construction (also a marvel- lous engineering job) on a shopping parade in the rebuilt city of Rotterdam more than holds its own against a Dutch equivalent of Welwyn Garden City-type idealistic ordinariness. Gabo can be quite tough on occasion, given half a chance.
Unfortunately, the fact remains that he has not been given many chances. So that what we encounter at the Arts Council/Tate exhibition is, from many aspects, a beautiful display of imaginative and obsessive preciosity. Gabo's ideals as a constructivist were deflected by the compromised society which he has had to work inside. What finally flowered are the re- strained ornamentations of a latter-day Faberge. I feel strongly, in any case, that this is the direction in which his gifts always lay : his solid, conventionally three-dimensional stone sculpture is third-rate. The American, Flanagan, is a better artist when it comes to large abstracted fossils, shells, animal and reptiles—and with a lighter
touch. Even a small piece of stone carved by Gabo retains a ponderous sensation of weight in no way alleviated by the way it is shaped or refined upon. Gabo found his métier in the open form, in which space itself acts as a kind of solid, certainly a partner in an intricately imaginative exercise in—what? The interpenetration of space by means of balanced and counterpointed masses, always regular in contour and linear density, of precisely equated transparencies. Volume is suggested by space, not stated in terms of mass.
There is no feeling of weight whatever; the sole survivor of the old order of things is gravity. All the implications are towards weight- lessness, rhythmic arabesque, and transparency.
If the dread word geometry puts you off, then grasp the fact at once that Gabo's imagination,
whatever he may protest in terms of Platonic idealism, functionalism or whatever, is geared consistently towards natural forms, flowers, plants, curling leaves, buds and so on. All this is highly enjoyable.
What is so strange is the connotation with Faberge, and the American artists Louis Com- fort Tiffany or Schlumberger. But Tiffany was not only a decorator, he was an inspired artist. You have only to see the large house in New York, viewable by appointment, where some of his finest work still glows and undermines the enveloping space. Since the disappearance of his workshop, and the earlier decline of everything William Morris believed in here in England, we have been starved of ornamentation.
And this is where Gabo has stepped in. Lack- ing entire walls to create, or whole façades of buildings—either of these commissions would have been a triumphant success—he has mostly been forced to work inside the restrictions of domestic or dealer's galleries measurements. This means that his best work has real purity, im- mense dignity as well as poise, delicacy and elaborate invention (see Linear Construction No. 2, 1949-53), whilst the worst—and this is pretty stunning—descends into decoration, like the best costume jewellery (see Linear No. 4, 1962) in terms of copper and gold and black and red, and so on.
The exception to all this, which denies every- thing I have said about the weakness of Gabo's closed volumes, is Vertical Construction, 1964, a closed leaf-like form playing a concerto, as it were, with a suavely undulating, attenuated spiral-exterior. And Gabo has the last word, beyond this, for the latest work in the show is one of the most beautiful and disciplined—and revelatory: Construction in Space : Suspended, 1965. Gabo lived in England for a long while, just before and during the war. We did not allow him to leave any public traces.
BRYAN ROBERTSON
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