Antoine Pevsner
b. 1884, Orel, Russia; d. 1962, Paris
Antoine Pevsner was born on January 18, 1884, in Orel, Russia. After leaving the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg in 1911, he traveled to Paris, where he saw the work of Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and Jean Metzinger. On a second visit to Paris in 1913 he met Amedeo Modigliani and Alexander Archipenko, who encouraged his interest in Cubism. Pevsner spent the war years 1915–17 in Oslo with his brother Naum Gabo. On his return to Russia in 1917 Pevsner began teaching at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts with Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich.
In 1920 Antoine Pevsner signed the Realistic Manifesto drafted by his brother Naum Gabo, proclaiming the intention of Constructivism as they conceived it. They sought to translate their apprehension of an absolute and essential reality as “the realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time.”1 They believed that space was given form through implications of depth rather than volume, and they rejected mass as the basic sculptural element. Line, rendered dynamic through directionality, established kinetic rhythms. The Constructivists advocated the use of contemporary industrial materials; they did not carve or model these materials according to sculptural conventions, but constructed them according to principles of modern technology. In their words, “The plumb-line in our hand, eyes as precise as a ruler, in a spirit as taut as a compass . . . we construct our work as the universe constructs its own, as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician his formula of the orbits.”2
Lucy Flint
1. Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art, ed. J. E. Bowlt, New York, 1976, p. 213. The entire manifesto, translated by Gabo, appears in this volume.
2. Ibid.
Anchored Cross (La Croix
ancrée), 1933. Marble, brass painted black, and crystal, 84.6 cm long (diagonally).
Peggy
Guggenheim Collection. 76.2553 PG 60. Antoine Pevsner © Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Spirit
drawing
portrait of the artist (left), 1939
Untitled