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NAUM GABO (1890-1977) Construction in Space: Suspended, c. 1970s Perspex, stainless steel spring-wire, phosphor-bronze cradle, on aluminium base Inscribed in the upper angle of the longitudinal perspex plane, 'Gabo' 51.8 x 60.3 x 55.2 cm (20 ⅜ x 23 ¾ x 21 ¾ in) (without artist's base) 3.2 x 68.5 x 19.1 cm (1 ¼ x 27 x 7 ½ in) (integral base) Provenance The Artist Gabo family collection Annely Juda Fine Art, London Private collection, UK Literature S. Nash and J. Merkert, Naum Gabo, Sixty Years of Constructivism: Catalogue Raisonné of the Constructions and Sculptures compiled by Colin C. Sanderson and Christina Lodder, New York, 1985, p. 250, no. 70.17 Ede met Gabo in a 'garret almost in the sky' in Paris in the 1920s, where he and his brother Antoine Pevsner were making a model for a 100m-high construction, to be 'in perpetual movement', that they hoped to erect in the Champs Elysées. 1 They became friends, seeing each other often after Gabo moved in the 1930s first to Hampstead, then, with the outbreak of war, to Cornwall. Visiting him in Carbis Bay in 1944, Ede admired Gabo's designs for a car incorporating a grille with a spiral motif and a kidney-shaped steering wheel. (Ede regretfully imagined how 'snappy' he would have felt driving it, when later offered a Humber station wagon by the Gibraltar War Department.) 2 It was in the United States, where Gabo moved post- war, that Ede acquired his first work by him. Gabo had been encouraged to make monoprints by his neighbour William Ivins Jr, a former curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who brought him woodcutting tools, Japanese tissue paper and ink. With these Gabo made Opus 1 (1950): his first monoprint engraved from the sawn-off end of a mahogany table leg. Contrary to the traditional understanding of the term, the monoprints Gabo took from his woodblocks were not unique. He might print forty or so, rubbing the back of the paper with a spoon or his fingers, but each would be different, inked in varying colours, thickly or thinly, sometimes printed in reverse, sometimes overpainted. When Ede stayed with Gabo and his wife in 1952, during a lecture tour, he was delighted to receive a gift of an early monoprint, Opus 5 (aka The Constellations) (1950), inscribed 'To Jim Ede … with love'. 3 In the late 1960s, Ede's enquiry about a sculpture to enrich his collection met with a fractious response. Gabo's wife Miriam wrote to explain: Gabo was suffering from backache, toothache, asthma and diabetes and needed to concentrate on making new work and realising his backlog of older ideas. 4 That same year, 1968, Joy Finzi (widow of the composer Gerald Finzi) told Ede of a Gabo sculpture she would receive as a bequest: Linear Construction in Space No.1 (1944–45). Made from a Perspex frame, strung with nylon threads, it belonged to a series exploring enclosure without confinement or solidity, conceived as a prototype for a public sculpture 40