GABO AT THE TATE
NAUM GABO’S EXHIBITION AT THE TATE has had something of the air of a triumphal home-coming. He has had a special relationship with England. His remove here from Paris coincided with an important shift in his own thinking, for it was in around 1936 that his intuitions about the “spheric” nature of space began to crystallize. His first visit here in 1935 had been in connection wit h an exhibition of continental avant-garde art, the first to show Mondrian, Arp, Giacometti and a whole lot of others whose work had only beer known in reproduction or on the odd visit to Paris. Gabo liked what he found here and settled the following-year in a studio in Hampstead, a stone’s throw from Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Herbert Read and several others who made up the hard core of the Modern Movement in this country. Gabo’s- place in this group was established with the publication in 1937 of “Circle-International Survey of Constructive Art,” of which he was joint editor and to which he contributed the first article.
Some of the other contributors to “Circle” were Mondrian, Gropius and Maholy-Nagy, all of whom were in Hampstead for a few years in the late ’30s, on their way to the United States. Gabo, of course, stayed on, later moving to Cornwall as did Nicholson and Hepworth. He left for the U.S.A. in 1946. The presence of these seasoned warriors in London at this time was of enormous potential importance. It was the first time that English artists had been exposed to the theoretical foundations of modern art on their home ground. The fact that there was so much less to show for it than one might have expected is partly due to the enclosed, private nature of English life at that time and to the total disruption of working conditions after 1940. Even more important was the comparative innocence in England of knowledge of the Central European contribution to modern art. What prevailed was a strong formalist tradition, Paris based, more a latter-day embellishment of neo-classical taste than a modern polemical position. Expressionism in all its forms was unacceptable. (To see the background to this taboo one has only to look up the catalog of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1913 and to contrast it with its American equivalent, the Armory show. Fry’s view of modern art was classicist and the only alternative to his reading, the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis, Bomberg and T. E. Hulme, fizzled out in the trenches of the First World War.)
There was therefore little to which the emigres of the ’30s could be related by way of background, notwithstanding the efforts of Herbert Read, whose “Art Now” had come out in 1933. The metaphysical and Expressionist roots of modern art were exotic; and, ironically, although England had contributed a great deal in the late 19th century to the concept of an integrated, socially responsible art, now, in the ’30s, English artists were quite cut off from Continental efforts to realize such a thing. The revolution that the artists with whom Gabo found himself were working on was a studio revolution, a matter of breaking a new style. The ’30s being what they were, there was a good deal of lip service to the ideal of the integration of the arts, and several of their most ardent supporters were architects, but even so, everything that they did and have done since has been within the traditional framework of the studio.
It was not, therefore, the Constructivist aspects of Gabo’s ideas which made their mark—not the open, unresolved ambitions—so much as the sealed-off and the perfected forms of the works. It was not until he had actually left England that a new wave of interest in Constructivism began to open up some of the broader implications of his influence. (I am thinking of Victor Pasmore, Mary and Kenneth Martin, Anthony Hill and John Ernest, all of whom made substantial contributions along this line from the early ’50s onwards.)
But the look of Gabo of the late ’30s is indelibly linked with a certain look of the time itself. This is why the Tate exhibition is such a curious experience in time. For one of my generation, weaned on “Art Now” and “Circle,” Gabo is Mr. Modern Art. It’s almost laughable to try to see these plastic convolutions for themselves, or to hook them on to the other Gabo, unknown in the flesh, the Gabo of the Revolution. Because these works are the essence of a certain flavor, an intimation of a different life, impossible to detach from certain experiences of growing up, an intimation colored too by sans serif type, Wells’ film, “Things to Come,” Auden’s early verse, a sight of the Hindenburg, transparent as a fish, droning down channel on a cloud less evening.
Now one can jump that gap, back to the author of the Realist Manifesto and “Monument for an Airport.” The early work makes its idealism manifest, and it irradiates the later works, breaks the spell of its perfection, its surface, wakes it. But there is a difference, all the same. One is aware that Gabo has been forced into a kind of rear-guard action, not retreating from his view of content but from his view of what an artist can accomplish, falling back step by step from an impossible present. The later work is equivocal, for all its completeness. How big is a certain piece meant to be? Are these materials definitive? David Thompson has put his finger squarely on it in an article in “Studio International” when he pointed out that the change after 1935 wasn’t only a matter of changing conceptions of space. It also involved scale. Everything up to that time had adumbrated architecture, an heroic, mass defying building. “After the thrusting and virile energy of projects that obviously would never be built, the more yielding delicacy, fragility and gracefulness of what Constructivism was supposed not to be about—‘objets d’art’ for the connoisseur.”
“Today is the deed” goes the heroic peroration of the Realistic Manifesto of 1920.
“We will account for it tomorrow.
The past we are leaving behind as carrion.
The future we leave to the fortune tellers.
We take the present today.”
If the later works are equivocal it is because, perhaps, they were neutered by the present that Gabo couldn’t take. There is no weakening of content; on the contrary. It is rather that in turning inwards there is a loss of literalness. Works which were literally models, even of impossible buildings, are more direct, pungent, than works which are nearer to symbolic models. To many of us it seemed that one of the most radical as well as the most satisfying works in the exhibition was the kinetic “Standing Wave” of 1920, a vibrating wire dissolved in the form of its own movement. Gabo almost dismissed it—it was simply an element, not a work in its own right. He had wanted to go back to it, to use it, the time hadn’t been right. Another time he had dismissed the strung wires in the open constructions of the later years. He had been misunderstood, people thought it was for the sake of the wires, didn’t see that it was for the sake of the space the wires enclosed.
Gabo’s idealism is unrepentant and it is this, I think, far more than the perfectionism of individual works which has made him meaningful to a new generation of artists to whom the English ’30s mean nothing. It is the breadth of his commitment, his modernity, his rejection of alienation. The slightly dowdy emigre of the ’30s has been rubbed out by this exhibition. It has lightly drawn in certain unsuspected possibilities, new orientations.
—Andrew Forge
