Gabo’s other carvings may seem to be primarily devoted to the shaping of masses. Yet the artist emphasises their continuities with the spatial concerns evident in the main body of his work. He told an interviewer in the 1960s:

My idea of space affects everything: that’s why I continue to carve in stone. I want to show that in out consciousness we are all transparent, space penetrates everything. Your eyes can’t penetrate the stone, but by following the contours on the surface I want your consciousness to become aware of the interior spaces and dynamic forces.

Once again the language in which Gabo described his art has a scientific resonance. The breaking down of the common-sensical distinction between solid matter and the surrounding empty space had been a fundamental tenet of modern physics, which conceived the physical universe as a continuous ‘field’ of forces and energies. Sir James Jeans provides a representative account of how this idea was understood in the 1930s:

…forever solid matter melts into insubstantial radiation: forever the tangible changes into the intangible… the tendency of modern physics is to resolve the whole universe into waves… These waves are of two kinds: bottled-up waves, which we call matter, and unbottled waves, which we call radiation or light… it no longer seems surprising that the fundamental particles of which matter is built should exhibit many of the properties of waves.

In other words, a block of stone did not differ in fundamental physical terms from a volume of space defined by transparent or opaque planes. Gabo’s shaping of the block was clearly designed to convey the presence of dynamic forces within the form, rather than to suggest an inert solidity. In Kinetic Stone Carving, for example the sensuous curvilinear forms advance and recede creating a sense of dynamic centrifugal energies within the form. The sharp definition of the of the linear edges plays a particularly important role in leading the eye around and, so to speak, through the form, thereby dematerialising its material substance. The format of linear rhythms circulating through and around interpenetrating volumes is further elaborated in many of the works in the present exhibition, notably Granite Craving, Quartz Stone and in the selection of translucent marbles for Repose, White stone and other carvings from his later career.

The strongly scientific or mathematical aura of Gabo’s work differentiates it from the carvings of Hepworth and Moore, which generally evoke associations with a more immediate imagery of the human figure or landscape. It was not Gabo’s purpose, however, merely to illustrate scientific ideas. In a text from the 1950s called ‘art and science’, he declared that both the artist and the scientist are prompted by the same creative urge to find a perceptible image of the hidden forces of nature’, and he expressed pride in the fact that Constructive art was ‘the first movement in art which has declared its acceptance of the scientific age and its spirit’. Nevertheless, for Gabo, art ultimately differs from science in that it springs, from and engages with, the realms of feeling and intuition, ass opposed to the ration pursuit of knowledge:

The new scientific vision of the world may affect and enhance the vision of the artist as a human being, but from there on the artist goes his own way and his art remains independent from science; from there on he carries his own vision bringing forth visual images which react on the human psychology and transfer his feelings of men in general, including the scientists.



Published to accompany an exhibition in the study galleries of the centre for the study of sculpture, Leeds City Art Gallery 16 February-6 May 1995