The Naum Gabo Papers consists of one archival box of copies of diaries, manuscripts and original photographs. The collection was donated to the Amherst College Center for Russian Culture by Thomas Whitney, Amherst College Class of 1937.
Naum Gabo (1890-1977), Russian-American sculptor, architect, theorist, and teacher, brother of Antoine Pevsner. Gabo lived in Munich and Norway until the end of the revolution, when he returned to Russia. With Pevsner he wrote the Realist Manifesto (1920), which proposed that new concepts of time and space be incorporated into works of art and that dynamic form replace static mass. His sculptural experiments with constructivism, a movement he helped found, were often transparent, geometrical abstractions composed of plastics and other materials. Gabo’s art conflicted with Soviet art directives. In 1922 he left Moscow for Berlin where he taight at the Bauhaus, later moving to England and then to the United States.
The collection is arranged alphabetically by type of material.
Additional Naum Gabo’s materials are held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University and at the Museum of Modern Art Archives in New York City.