ANTOINE PEVSNER
Orel (Rusia), 1884 – París, (Francia) 1962

His years of training alternated between the School of Fine Arts in Kiev and the Academy in St. Petersburg. Through collectors in Moscow he had access to Impressionist and Fauve works. However, it was not until his first visit to Paris, in 1912, that he came into contact with the avant-garde, especially with Cubism, which he adopted, at least in terms of form, until 1914. He then returned to Paris and produced his first abstract paintings, based, nevertheless, on prismatic elements. He spent the middle years of the First World War in Oslo with his brother, Naum Gabo. During the initial stages of the Revolution they both returned to Russia. There he complemented his activity as an artist with teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow. The influence of his brother and the adoption of the principles of the “Realist Manifesto” that Gabo wrote in 1920 led him to sculpture. It was not until 1923, however, when he went to live in Paris, that he began to produce work in accordance with those ideas, which he exhibited together with his brother’s work at the Galerie Percier in 1924. The collaboration between them continued two years later when they designed the costumes and sets for Diaghilev’s ballet La Chatte, and it extended until 1948, when the MoMA organised a joint exhibition of the two brothers in New York.
In the early thirties he adopted French nationality and joined the Abstraction-Création group, and his work began to undergo a change. With his Surfaces développables (Developable Surfaces) he shifted away from his early work, subject to a complex structure of two-dimensional planes, and moved on to distinctly abstract constructions dominated by curves produced by twisting planes. In this way he transmitted movement to matter, and the movement was reproduced in the viewer’s experience of seeing the work. He continued with this line of experimentation in his Constructions cinétiques (Kinetic Constructions) during the forties, founding the Réalités Nouvelles group with Herbin and Gleizes in 1946. His first major retrospective exhibition was held in 1957, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.