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In 1915 he changed his name to Naum Gabo to distinguish himself as an artist from his brother Antoine Pevsner, who had made a name for himself in Paris.
The brothers became more widely known after their move back to pre-revolutionary Russia in 1917. They had seen at first hand the art of the avant-garde in the west.
While working at the Free Art studios in Moscow, Gabo developed his more formal constructivist aims. He met Tatlin, Kandinsky and Malevich, who followed a different path into design and super-realism.
In 1920, he wrote and jointly published, with Antoine, The Realistic Manifesto where they laid down their five tenets of Constructivism.
Given the political upheavals and the difficulties of obtaining materials, the Manifesto was not very realistic at all according to Martin Hammer (Hammer M. 2020). Its pivotal concepts were about mass and dynamism:
Every engineer has known for a long time that the static force of bodies, their material resistance, does not depend on the amount of their mass….We reject in sculpture mass as a sculptural element.
We assert a new element in visual art, KINETIC RHYTHMS, as the basic forms of our perceptions of real time.
Gabo's metaphor for this outlook was Kinetic Construction Sculpture (1919-1920), a vertical rod which oscillated faster than the eye could see, creating a three-dimensional form.
In the exhibition one could press a button and start the rod’s oscillation. This guaranteed the interactivity of the display and made one more curious about the resulting movement.
In 1937, Gabo wrote that the constructive idea sees and values art only as a creative act…The creative genius of mankind obtains the most important and singular place.
Plastic model for Torsion (c1928)
Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) 1919-20, replica metal, wood and electric motor © Nina and Graham Williams/Tate, London 2021