False Credentials

...For it was Gabo who, under the impetus of developments in modern physics and mechanics, conceived the idea of using space as a form of sculptural mass...

...He still had no independent path of his own in this realm and he resisted the necessary first step of following the path that Gabo had taken I know from letters written at that time that it cost Gabo a lot of effort to convince Antoine that such an enterprise carried nothing shameful about it, and that it in no way diminished an artist so long as it led to his finding a new means of expression...

...Nothing should be easier to document than the source of a particular esthetic idea that, with a good deal of fanfare and critical debate, was committed to print within the memory of living artists...

...The anguish that Alexei's recollections have caused in Paris may be judged from the title of the long article which Michel Ragon, one of the most engage critics in the French capital, devoted to the Sketch in the weekly Arts: "Le sculpteur Pevsner a-t-il pille son frere cadet Gabo...

...Concerning the crucial years of 19171923, Alexei writes: "Antoine always supported Gabo's ideology, but never defended it at meetings or seminars, since he always left this to Gabo...

...It is this notion which Alexei's memoir renders completely untenable...

...He also permitted him to repeat variations on them and taught him how to handle metal and plastic materials...

...A document of this sort—and one whose own provenance tells a fascinating story quite apart from its critical contents—has now come to light which necessitates a thorough rewriting of the history of Russian Constructivism...

...From the moment Antoine arrived in Paris he was in a state of despair He was at a complete dead end, and Gabo saw that he would only be saved if he could find a new path to follow, a path that did not require inventiveness and on which he would have a guide...

...So long as "originality," in the narrow, technical sense, rather than intrinsic artistic merit, continues to dominate the writing of 20th-century art history, revelations of this sort are of the greatest importance...

...The younger Pevsner reestablished contact with Gabo through Lloyd Goodrich, the Director of the Whitney Museum in New York who had written the catalogue essay...

...In the course of this useful elucidation, Gabo emerges as a magnificently gifted and irrepressible creative artist and thinker, moving with ease from the technical, workaday problems of the studio—and at a time when the materials he employed (sheet metal and plexiglass) were not yet in general use by sculptors—to the theoretical considerations explored in his early writings...

...At this time Antoine did not feel secure in his understanding of these ideas and was himself still learning a great deal from Gabo...

...He was not even a sculptor in that period, and contributed nothing but his name to the Constructivist manifesto drawn up by Naum Gabo and based entirely on Gabo's own theory and practice as an artist...

...Since in many cases the market value of a man's work is directly proportionate to the role he claims—or allows to be claimed for him—in the art history of his time, the writing of that history is bound to be something of a comedy so long as the interested parties preside over its basic materials...

...Like modern art, the writing of this history has often been a shifting kaleidoscope of appearance and reality, and there is every reason to expect it to become more so in the future...

...Gabo believed in Antoine's abilities "There was, however, one other circumstance that impelled Gabo to give Antoine this encouragement...

...Gabo, who was living in Berlin at the time, often visited him in Paris and encouraged him to take up Constructivist sculpture...

...And he then gives this account of the '20s: "Only after Antoine had left Moscow in 1923 and had settled in Paris in 1924 did I learn from photographs of his work, which he sent to me in Moscow, that he had first begun to experiment with Constructivist sculpture in 1925...

...It was only after Antoine settled in Paris that he began his career as a sculptor— and even then, relying entirely on Gabo's methods, ideas, and personal encouragement...

...Gabo tried with all his might, as he wrote to me, to spread the name of Pevsner He also organized joint exhibitions, personally wrote introductions to the catalogues, and always allowed Pevsner to add his name to them, although Antoine had no part in the writing of them...

...In the face of the general decline which the School of Paris has suffered in recent years, Antoine Pevsner had been increasingly pressed into service to uphold France's position in the esthetic vanguard—and solely by virtue of his "historic role" in launching the Constructivist movement...

...These experiments were carried out following the methods and example of Gabo, who had done similar things around 1915-17...

...The burden of Alexei Pevsner's memoir is not, of course, to discredit his brother Antoine but to elucidate the historical and biographical origins of the Constructivist style...

...Yet the fact is that these artists sometimes have a stake—real or imagined—in historical dissimulation, and have frequently proved very adept at altering the provenance of specific conceptions and devices when it suited their interests (especially their market interests) to do so...

...The document in question is one of the unforeseen dividends of the cultural exchange agreements with brought an exhibition of American art to Moscow in 1959...

...The Sketch has been published by Augustin & Schoonman, Amsterdam, and translated from the Russian by Michael Scammell and William Burke...

...Hence the mention of his name in the Moscow catalogue, even though Gabo's work was not in the show...

...It was only then that Alexei Pevsner caught up with his brothers' subsequent achievement and renown, and with the distortions which history had meanwhile imposed on their earliest and most "historic" work...

...Gabo instructed him, supplied him with themes, and left his models behind so that Antoine might study their structure...

...This renewal of acquaintance with his older brothers, and with the work they had done since leaving Russia in the early '20s, prompted Alexei to put on record his recollections of their early years together...

...The reason Antoine took approximately eight years to decide to follow his younger brother was simply that he had never adapted himself to sculpture...

...Still, from time to time a disclosure is made which places an artist, a group, or an idea in an entirely new perspective...

...Nothing, it seems, should be easier to establish than the exact chronology of movements and events whose chief protagonists are still alive and active on the art scene...

...The portrait we are given of Antoine, on the other hand, is of an artist (four years older than Gabo) suffering from intellectual indecision and morbid self-doubt, a victim of frail gifts and creative ennui...

...In the Introduction to the catalogue of that exhibition mention was made of the sculptor Naum Gabo, who, together with Pevsner (his older brother), had been thought to be one of the founders of Constructivism in the early years of the Russian Revolution and co-author of its principal manifesto...

...For according to Alexei's account, Antoine Pevsner played no role whatever in the creation of Constructivism...

...It now turns out that this "role," on which a great reputation was built, a virtual monument erected, and numerous "studies" and hommages published the world over, was the sheerest fiction...

...i. e., of constructing a sculpture in such a way that so-called "empty" space would function as the equivalent of those solid volumes theretofore created by means of monolithic materials such as stone or wood...

...It also requires some revision of the standard histories of modern French sculpture in which one of the protagonists of the tale—Antoine Pevsner—is given a position considerably at variance with his actual accomplishment...

...This short but immensely interesting document, composed in 1960-61, has now appeared for the first time in an English translation under the title, A Biographical Sketch of My Brothers, Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, accompanied by photographs which Alexei preserved for 40 years...

...Gabo had left the Soviet Union in 1922, and after a protracted and sometimes difficult residence in Western Europe—he moved from Germany to France to England, more or less as politics required—he came to the United States in 1946 where he has remained a productive and influential artist and a kind of elder statesman of the American art world...

...In the long view, however, they might also perform an even more useful service in shifting our attention away from historical precedents and onto the actual qualities of the individual work of art...

...Presumably Antoine's death in 1962 has cleared the way for the publication of Alexei's memoir, which reveals the older Pevsner as a man living on false historical credentials...

...Gabo's name caught the attention of one visitor to the exhibition: Alexei Pevsner, a Soviet scientist and the younger brother of the two sculptors who had been out of touch with them since the darkest days of the purges—23 years earlier...

...Yet the notion has persisted—and was, indeed, enshrined in the exhibition which the Museum of Modern Art devoted to their work in 1948—that the two brothers existed as something like creative equals and as co-authors of a joint artistic program...

...And it was Gabo too who extrapolated from the Cubism of Picasso and Braque the sculptural syntax, and brought into play the new materials, which were indispensable for translating this radical conception into concrete works of art...

...It has always been clear to anyone more interested in sculptural quality than in art-historical games that Gabo was the superior artist of the pair...