Naum Gabo

Naum Gabo, born Naum Neemia Pevsner was an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and the subsequent development of twentieth-century sculpture. His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works that assimilated new materials such as nylon, wire, lucite and semi-transparent materials, glass and metal. Responding to the scientific and political revolutions of his age, Gabo led an eventful and peripatetic life, moving to Berlin, Paris, Oslo, Moscow, London, and finally the United States, and within the circles of the major avant-garde movements of the day, including Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, de Stijl and the Abstraction-Création group. Two preoccupations, unique to Gabo, were his interest in representing negative space—"released from any closed volume" or mass—and time. He famously explored the former idea in his Linear Construction works (1942-1971)—used nylon filament to create voids or interior spaces as "concrete" as the elements of solid mass—and the latter in his pioneering work, Kinetic Sculpture (1920), often considered the first kinetic work of art.

5 August 1890

Born on the same birth date (5 August 1890): Erich Kleiber

Born on the same birth day (5 August): Abbé Pierre • Bob McCarthy • Neil Armstrong • Olivia Holt • Richard Ottley

Born in the same month (August 1890): Angus Lewis Macdonald • August Alle • Bruno Tesch • Cecil Kellaway • Dolf Luque • Duke Kahanamoku • Eino Kaila • Erich Kleiber • H. P. Lovecraft • Harry Hopkins • Jacques Ibert • Jean Rhys • Konstantin Melnikov • Man Ray • Samuel Frederick Henry Thompson • Stefan Bastyr • Walther Funk