The fountain is known as the 'Gabo
Fountain' and is named after the designer Naum Gabo a Russian sculptor. The
Garden Visit website [visit
link] tells us about the fountain:
"There is an excellent example of an Abstract Modern
garden on the South Bank of the River Thames, opposite the Houses of Parliament.
It was built on the site of the former house of the Treasurer of the hospital
(destroyed by bombing). The fountain which forms the centerpiece of the garden
was designed by Naum Gabo (1890-1977). Gabo a Russian Constructivist sculptor
who moved to England in the 1930's and influenced a generation of sculptors,
including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Constructivism has had a
particular influence on garden designers and landscape archtiects because of the
way in which the design of objects 'constructs' a spatial pattern. The jets of
water, and the space they define, form part of the scultpture. One can also
regard the planting and the buildings as part of the composition (see note on
the compositional elements of garden and landscape design).
Revolving Torsion is made of stainless steel. In Gabo's
theory of 'on-colour' stainless steel 'has the same tone of water to a certain
extent, but its shadows you can see, and you ought to see in the
water'."
This Russian website [visit
link] tells us about the sculptor:
"Webs of water spin from a steel sculpture in the garden
of London’s St Thomas’s Hospital, against the backdrop of Big Ben across the
River Thames. This elegant fountain is the work of Naum Gabo, a pioneer of the
constructivist movement that began in Russia in 1919 and profoundly influenced
art across Europe and America.
Gabo’s work appears in such scattered venues as New
York’s MOMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn in Washington, and the
Rotterdam branch of De Bijenkorf department store, which commissioned a
25-metre-high freestanding metal sculpture. But the largest collection of Gabo's
work is actually here in the UK in the Tate Galleries. And, using material from
its archives, Tate Publishing has brought out a new book on the artist this
month.
Gabo's Two Cubes (1930), which is on display
in the Tate Modern, illustrates Gabo's idea of constructing an object's inner
space. The cubes are made of painted wood, one solid and one inverted. This idea
was central to his philosophy of sculpture. As his brother Alexei explained in a
1964 biography: “Its function was not to delimit the boundaries of things but to
show the trends of hidden rhythms and forces in them.”
Born as Naum Pevsner in Russia in 1890, he changed his
name to Gabo in 1915 to distinguish himself from his other brother, Antoine
Pevsner, who was also an artist. Together they wrote the 1920 Realistic
Manifesto, which rejected a millennium of “static” art, in favour of a new
element in visual art: "kinetic rhythms, as the basis of our perception of real
time.”
Gabo was involved in many collaborations. In the 1920s,
he worked with Diaghilev, founder of the Ballet Russe, to produce a geometric,
transparent set for a ballet. In the 1930s he entered an architectural design
into the competition to build the new “Palace of the Soviets”. He also lived a
somewhat nomadic life. In 1922, he moved to Berlin to take part in the “First
Russian Art Exhibition", where he lived for a decade. Gabo moved again, to
Paris, and then spent ten years from 1936 in England, where he edited artistic
journals and married Miriam Israels. He became part of a famously creative
group, while living in Cornwall. There is a fabulous beach photo taken in 1942
of Gabo in his swimming trunks, dangling seaweed above abstract artist, Ben
Nicholson, who is sat on the sand with a sunhat and dog. In 1946 he moved to the
United States where he lectured at Yale, Harvard and Chicago, took American
citizenship in 1952 and died in Connecticut in 1977.
Also in the Tate Modern is Gabo's “Spheric Theme
(Penetrated Variation)”, created during the artists years in Cornwall in the
1930s. A single sheet of bronze forms a rounded shape, bisected by a flat
square. Gabo was to work and rework this form over decades. He wrote about his
spheric-theme series: “I enclose the space in one curved continuous surface …
and give the space the curved character which it has in my
perception.”
The pioneering constructivist ideas that Gabo brought
from Russia were to have an incalculable effect on art in Britain and also in
the USA. The critic and poet, Herbert Read in 1942 had called Gabo’s dynamic
Spiral Theme, “the highest point ever reached by the aesthetic intuition of
man.”
In his later years, his thoughts returned increasingly
to his childhood in Bryansk, as he wrote in a memoir, to the “image of myself as
a young boy, saturated to the core by Russia, its people, its nature, its songs,
its language, its land and sky…”
Over the years, Gabo created some of the 20th century’s
iconic sculptural images. “Constructed Head No. 2” is probably his most
recognisable image, a geometric bust made from intersecting flat pieces of
metal. From a small cardboard model in 1916, this figure grew to a two-metre
steel head in 1966, when Gabo refers to it in his diary as “my child.” In the
same year, Christopher Cornford of London’s Royal College of Art described the
figure, at the opening of the Gabo exhibition at the Tate, as a modern “Madonna
of the Annunciation”, embodying “in her very structure the most beautiful and
profound discovery of 20th century art”."