Naum Gabo (1890–1977) possessed an astonishing consistency of vision. Nothing in the design of his complex sculpture Column (1975), in which two tall, rectangular intersecting glass panels stand in the center of a number of stainless steel and plexiglass circles, indicates that the artist made it some fifty years after, say, Construction in Space with Balance on Two Points (1924–5), a group of intersecting square and rectilinear plexiglass planes held aloft in the center of a bisected plexiglass semicircle. From his first constructions of 1915 until his death, Gabo remained committed to working within the Constructivist aesthetic he helped establish.

He was born Naum Neemia Borisovich Pevsner in 1890, and changed his name to Gabo in 1915 to avoid confusion with his brother Antoine Pevsner. Together they penned the Realistic Manifesto, a Constructivist document advocating pure abstract sculpture, but which rejected ...

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