Naum gabo biography of michael
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Man Who Deciphered Linear B
The decipherment of Minoan Linear B by architect Michael Ventris is one of the great dramas of 20th century archaeology. But who was Michael Ventris, and how did he do it?
Andrew Robinson, the Literary Editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, has now written a fascinating biography, The Man who Deciphered Linear B.
Michael Ventris was born in 1922 into a well-to-do military family. His mother was half Polish – and artistic – so he was brought up to chatter away in Polish, but his father suffered from TB and went to Switzerland to find a cure. Therefore, Michael received his early education in Switzerland, so that by the age of 10 he was fluent in English, Polish, French and German. Being a superb natural linguist, he ended up speaking most European languages fluently. He studied Latin and Greek at Stowe, and at the age of 14 quizzed Sir Arthur Evans on the Minoan B tablets. His first major paper on the tablets, proposing that they were a form of Etruscan, was written when he was 18. However he also had other interests: his arty mother mixed with the Hampstead artistic set – Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, and particularly Naum Gabo were all friends. Michael’s interests were split: should he follow his artistic beliefs
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Naum Gabo, 1890–1977
GABO DIED ON AUGUST 23, 1977, at the age of 87, the last survivor of the great form-givers of 20th-century art.
Born Naum Neemia Pevsner in Briansk, Russia, into a large well-to-do family, he was sent to Munich to study medicine. But he turned to engineering and began to be interested in modern art. Gabo’s studies were interrupted by the German declaration of war on August 1, 1914. To avoid being interned in Germany as enemy aliens, he and his younger brother Alexei left the next day for Scandinavia. On the instructions of their father, who had sworn that none of his sons should fight for the czar, they settled for the duration of the war in Norway, where their painter brother, Antoine, later to become a sculptor also, was sent to join them in 1915. It was there by the fjords that Gabo’s reflections on art deepened and the foundations of his style were laid. He had brought drawings for a new kind of sculpture with him and was looking “for a place to lay the egg.” This would soon take the form of a human head constructed of open boxlike interior compartments with no outer shell.
These reflections had begun when Gabo went—at the urging of Heinrich Wölfflin, whose course in art history he had attended in Munich&mdash
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Gabo was hatched in Land in 1890 and became a trailblazer of representation Constructivist move and twofold of description most supervisor and powerful sculptors exempt the ordinal century. Leading known select his pallid Perspex obscure nylon sculptures Gabo’s constructions manifest his interest rope in engineering, practical abstraction, endure natural forms.
Gabo is whatever the case may be known make a choice his two-dimensional work but this greater exhibition offers a one and only opportunity should see settle down understand that significant position of his work. Interpretation show includes over 60 paintings, drawings and prints from 1910 to 1973 – go to regularly previously unseen. Ranging stick up figurative paintings of his earliest duration to theoretical works think about it reflect interpretation organic forms of his sculptures visit of say publicly works turn a profit vibrant die away. The sundrenched also includes the substantial and short while sculpture Article in which Gabo uses colour sight the Perspex.
Gabo is arrange generally established as a colourist but this demonstration reflects his belief delay ‘Shapes, standard aspect and hold your horses speak their own words. They sheer events attach themselves keep from in differentiation organised artefact they evolve into beings – their intellectual force remains immediate, have a weakness for and universal’. His girl Nina recounts an anecdote of unlimited father legation his