By Caroline Maclean, author of Circles and Squares: The Lives and Art of the Hampstead Modernists published by Bloomsbury
Naum Gabo was a sculptor of space rather than material. ‘Space is not around us, space is in us’ he explained in his 80s. The present fireplace, originally commissioned for a house in Redruth, Cornwall in 1946 curves gently inwards, as if inviting us into its own space: a beautifully simple design. It was one of Gabo’s last pieces before he left for America in 1946.
Gabo was working in stone (as well as his more familiar Perspex) in the mid-40s. He finally completed Kinetic Stone Carving in 1944 (which he had begun in 1936), introducing space and movement into a single block of Portland stone. And in April 1945 he asked John Wells to send him some slightly ‘yellowish boney colour’ stone from the Scilly Isles. And then he completed his fossil-like Granite Carving in 1945 from Tintagel stone. It was just after this that Gabo was commissioned to design two fireplaces for the new home of Mr and Mrs Ince in Redruth, up the coast from Carbis Bay where Gabo was living with his wife Miriam. Mr Ince was the chief obstetrician for Cornwall and his wife, who knew Miriam through a mutual friend, was interested in modern art. They commissioned this slate grey fireplace for the drawing room and a brown one for the dining room (that no longer exists).
Gabo went with Ince to the Polyphant Quarries at Dela bole near Tintagel and they chose the stone together: one single piece for the mantel, three slabs for the hearth and smaller pieces for the rest. The selection and cutting were supervised by Gabo. The design is typically elegant and embodies Gabo’s ideas of space and the ‘essential’ rhythm of the object he described in his Realistic Manifesto in 1920. The fireplace curves inwards by four inches and although Gabo didn’t want a mantlepiece Mrs Ince insisted and its slim shadow enhances the convex curve. The individual stone slabs are vertically arranged, a simple reversal of a conventional brick bonding pattern. The subtle differences in the colours of the slabs from deep slate to warmer ochres and umbers, particularly towards the centre above the fireplace, highlight the curve and create the appearance of an almost woven texture. Gabo was thinking about textiles. He had recently completed ‘Linear Construction Number 1’ and intended a large version of it to be placed near a textile factory as the strings were an abstract representation of weaving. The fireplace is similar: a deceptively simple, beautifully executed piece of modernist design.
Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson had persuaded Gabo and his wife Miriam to join them in Carbis Bay in Cornwall after the outbreak of war in 1939. They found them ‘Faerystone cottage’, almost at the end of the driveway of Adrian Stokes and Margaret Mellis's house, where Ben and Barbara had moved with their triplets just a week or two earlier. Adrian and Margaret had a wireless and the three couples spent most of their evenings together. Gabo and Miriam planned to stay for a couple of weeks before crossing the Atlantic but then the passenger liner SS Athenia was torpedoed by a U-boat and so they cancelled their tickets and ended up staying in Cornwall until 1946. It turned out to be an important period in Gabo's career.
Gabo (born Nehemiah Pevzner) had an idyllic childhood growing up in the Mogilev District of Southwest Russia ‘among peasants, the poetry of the woods, the fields, the marshes, the snows and the wolf packs.’ Perhaps this was why Cornwall felt like ‘a spot of paradise’, although, he admitted, ‘it is somewhat windy.’ He had lived all over Europe, he studied in Munich (medicine, philosophy and then engineering), lived in Copenhagen and Oslo (where he decided to change his name to avoid confusion with his brother), taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau, and then moved to Paris and worked on the Ballet Russes before coming to London in 1935. Ben Nicholson found him a flat on Lawn Road, just down the road from the lsokon block of flats where Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy had recently moved in. Gabo was impressed by the sense of optimism and sympathy towards abstract art in London. Irrespective of his surroundings, Gabe was always elegantly turned out and made an impression in Carbis Bay in his cream overcoat, light trousers and a white trilby when out walking 'Snezhka' (snowball) his Samoyed dog, along the coast path.
The first two years of the war were difficult for Gabo. He was extremely anxious about his brother and was ‘suffering incredibly’ and had a ‘feeling of some kind of emptiness.’ It didn't help that he and Miriam were in great financial difficulty. The landscape offered some relief: ‘one looks at the sea (for the past few days it has been especially delightful)’ and yet ‘the heart suffers looking at it, and the contrast with what is happening in the world’. And then in 1941 Miriam gave birth to their daughter Nina. This was a turning point and in the months that followed he began work on Spiral Theme, which was exhibited at the London Museum. Herbert Read (much to Gabo’s delight) described it as ‘the highest point ever reached by the aesthetic intuition of man’. Spiral Theme gave way to ‘Linear Construction Number 1’, which has been described as the most beautiful plastic object ever made. The threads are closely strung together and create an illusion of a gently curved form with an ellipse at the centre. Helen Sutherland called it ‘an angelic instrument’ and bought it. Gabo’s purpose with ‘Linear Construction Number 1’ was simple and constructive in every sense: ‘I am offering in my art what comfort I can to alleviate the pains and convulsions of our time ... to remind us that the image of the world can be different.’ Gabo designed the fireplace shortly after.
Provenance
Mr and Mrs Ince, Redruth, Cornwall, commissioned directly from the designer, 1946
Literature
Christina Lodder and Martin Hammer, Constructing Modernity, The Art & Career of Naum Gabo, New Haven, 2000, illustrated p. 297