Naum Gabo Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct ; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities. I call them images, not in Plato's sense (namely that they are only reflections of reality), but I hold that these images are the reality itself and that there is no reality beyond this reality except when in our creative process we change the images: then we have created new realities.

Naum Gabo
Art has no need of philosophical arguments, it does not follow the signposts of philosophical systems; Art like life, dictates systems to philosophy.

Naum Gabo
We affirm depth as the only pictorial and plastic form of space.

Naum Gabo
The way of a creative mind is always positive, it always asserts; it does not know the doubts which are so characteristic of the scientific mind.

Naum Gabo
If an artist has no experience before he makes a painting or a sculpture, he is not an artist.

Naum Gabo
The image my work invokes is the image of good - not evil; the image of order - not chaos; the image of life - not death. And that is all the content of my constructions amounts to.

Naum Gabo
Either build functional houses and bridges or create pure art or both. Don't confuse one with the other. Such art is not pure constructive art, but merely an imitation of the machine.

Naum Gabo
It needs a poet like Schwitters to show us that unobserved elements of beauty are strewn and spread all around us and we can find them everywhere in the portentous as well as in the insignificant, if only we care to look, to choose and to fit them into a comely order.

Naum Gabo
The growth of new ideas is more difficult and lengthy the deeper they are rotted in life. Resistance to them is the more obsitnate and exasperated the more persistent their growth is.

Naum Gabo
[The Constructive idea...] has revealed a universal law that the elements of a visual art such as lines, colours, shapes, possess their own forces of expression independent of any association with the external aspects of the world; that their life and action are self-conditioned psychological phenomena rooted in human nature; that those elements are not chosen by convention by any utilitarian or other reason as words and figures are, they are not merely abstract signs, but they are immediately and organically bound up with human emotions. The revelation of this fundamental law has opened up a vast field in art giving the possibility of expression to those human impulses and emotions which have been neglected.

Naum Gabo
The Force of Art lies in its immediate influence on human psychology and in its active contagiousness.

Naum Gabo
He (Piet Mondrian) couldn't look after himself properly. He was terrible [sic] thin, and seemed to live mostly on currants and vegetable stew, because he followed the Haye diet.

Naum Gabo
If I were an academician... or a believer in a higher reality outside me, as most people are (lucky creatures!), I would have no need for any justification for painting landscapes, or portraits, or social realism. I would rely on my so-called common sense, on which I see and feel, and I would enjoy it. Or I would fix one point in the distant haze of that unknown reality, would try to approach it as nearly as I could, and would find solace in the fanatical belief that I am the only one who is portraying that reality which is the only truth.

Naum Gabo
What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of Science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts

Naum Gabo
I have come to the conclusion that a work of art restricted to what the artist has put in it is only a part of itself. It only attains full stature with what people and time make of it. It involves the whole complex of human relation to life. It is a mode of thinking, acting, perceiving and living.

Naum Gabo
[Constructivism is] not as a tool or even a specific method, but rather as a perfect union of the coming state and the movement's 'spiritual' aims.

Naum Gabo
From the very beginning of the Constructivist Movement it was clear to me that a constructed sculpture, by its very method and technique brings sculpture very near to architecture... My works of this time up to 1924... are all in the search for an image which would fuse the sculptural element with the architectural element in one unit. I consider this Column the culmination of that search.

Naum Gabo
Space and time are the only forms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed... The realisation of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art... We renounce the thousand-year-old delusion in art that held the static rhythms as the only elements of the plastic and pictorial arts. We affirm in these arts a new element, the kinetic rhythms as the basic forms of our perception of real time.

Naum Gabo
I realized that the image I had been given by my teachers, the scientists... by their way of looking at Nature, was just another stage setting with all the magnificence and ingenuity that the genius of any artist produces in a work of art. I realized that in my scientific journey I had been under the power of a magic spell of a work of art whose reality was just as true as the verity of the image in an artist's vision.

Naum Gabo
The shapes we are creating are not abstract, they are absolute.

Naum Gabo
Science looks and observes and art see and foresees. Every great scientist has experienced a moment when the artist in him saved the scientist.

Naum Gabo
Art and Science are two different streams which rise from the same creative force and flow into the same ocean of the common culture, but the currents of these two streams flow in different directions.

Naum Gabo
There is no indication of success up to now in the bringing together of art and science. To achieve success the artist must be spiritually at home in the field of science so he can think and feel in the same way as the scientist. A spiritual union, not a technical one, is requested.

Naum Gabo
Up to now sculptors have preferred the mass and neglected or paid little attention to such an important component of mass as space … we consider it as an absolute sculptural element. I do not hesitate to affirm that the perception of space is a primary natural sense which belongs to the basic senses of our psychology

Naum Gabo
More often than not, [people] expect a painting to speak to them in terms other than visual, preferably in words, whereas when a painting or a sculpture needs to be supplemented and explained by words it means either that it has not fulfilled its function or that the public is deprived of vision,

Naum Gabo