Naum Gabo — sculptor with roots in the Russian Empire
Naum Gabo was born Neemia (Naum) Borisovich Pevzner on 5 August 1890, in Bryansk according to most sources, though some museums give Klimovichi, now in Belarus; both were then in the Russian Empire. He came from an assimilated Jewish family, had a Russian Orthodox nanny and, like many children of such families, was baptised. His elder brother Antoine Pevsner also became a sculptor.
In 1910 he went to Munich University to study medicine and the natural sciences, attended Heinrich Wölfflin's lectures on art history, and later turned to engineering. In 1913 he joined his brother in Paris and met the avant-garde. When the First World War broke out he moved to Copenhagen and then Oslo, where in 1915 he made his first constructed sculptures, heads built from planes of cut sheet material, and adopted the name Gabo so as not to be confused with his brother.
He returned to Russia in 1917 and lived in Moscow until 1922. In 1920 he and Antoine wrote the Realistic Manifesto, a statement of the aims of a new art of space and time, and Gabo made one of the first kinetic sculptures. In 1922 he left for Berlin, where the First Russian Art Exhibition opened at the Van Diemen Gallery; he stayed there for ten years, in contact with the Bauhaus and the De Stijl group, and did not return to Russia until 1962.
In 1932 he moved to Paris and joined the Abstraction-Création group, and in 1935 or 1936 to England. In London and then, from 1939, at Carbis Bay in Cornwall, he worked alongside Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and the critic Herbert Read, and with Nicholson and the architect Leslie Martin edited Circle, a survey of constructive art, in 1937. In 1944 he joined the Design Research Unit, and in 1946 moved to the United States, settling in Connecticut in 1953. He lectured at Yale and Harvard and took commissions including a large sculpture for the Bijenkorf store in Rotterdam.
In 1971 he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He died in Waterbury, Connecticut, on 23 August 1977, aged eighty-seven.
Tracing the roots — Bryansk (Russia) — or Klimovichi (now Belarus)
Born Naum Pevzner in 1890 in Bryansk (or Klimovichi), in the Russian Empire, he returned to Russia in 1917, worked in Moscow until 1922 and there wrote the Realistic Manifesto with his brother Antoine Pevsner in 1920, before leaving for Berlin.
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Bryansk (Russia) — or Klimovichi (now Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.