the times | Monday July 27 2020 1GT 9
arts
Nature can provide its own special
effects when the weather turns
inhospitable. Summer storms are
an occupational hazard here. (August
is, surprisingly, the wettest month.)
Curnow and her colleagues have
been adept at calculating the risks of
a weather front causing mayhem; she
jokes that it has finally been an
opportunity to put her geography
degree to good use.
To cancel or not to cancel can be
a knife-edge decision. Some years
ago a production of Tosca by Surrey
Opera coincided with a forecast of bad
weather. Curnow and her colleagues
were in two minds. “It was very sultry
and very still, and we knew a big
storm was coming. At seven o’clock
you could see the dark clouds, and we
knew we wouldn’t be able to get to
the end, but there was no reason not
to start, so we sent out text messages
offering refunds to anyone who didn’t
want to come, but saying we’ll see
how far we can get.
“We eventually got through Act I,
but in the torture scene in Act II the
lightning was flashing out at sea.
They’d actually staged the scene with
the actor in an electric chair. We had
to stop in the end. We were the last
ones walking out of the car park
when the golf-ball sized hailstones
started coming down.”
And now they are contending with
another, very different kind of storm.
This one threatens to sweep away
entire careers and livelihoods, but you
get the distinct impression that the
Minack will batten down the hatches
and see it through.
Full programme: minack.comhit on German television. A good
chunk of the Minack’s income comes
from visitors paying £6 a time to view
the grounds. One advantage, Curnow
says, is that, unlike many of her peers,
she doesn’t have to spend time chasing
donors; instead, the plays, the actors
and the ideas take priority.
A total of 300,000 people came to
the theatre last year. Of those, 120,
bought tickets for performances. For
those who have come to see the shows
themselves, one of the theatre’s great
assets is the view. Watching
performances as the sun sets and
artificial lighting blends with
moonlight has long been a unique
asset. Sadly, the new regimen, with
its socially distanced queues when the
doors open, means that shows are
beginning and ending earlier.
“We were worried about
maintaining social distancing when
audiences were leaving,” Curnow says.
“It can be difficult when people feel
time pressure in the car park in the
dark. It’s hard to marshal them. So
that means one of the things we’ve
lost is the lighting. Then again, every
show we have here plays matinees,
so we tell companies that they can’t
rely on the lighting artistically.”
ALAMY; LYNN BATTENVisual art
Naum Gabo
Tate St Ives
{{{{(absences and shadows as from
anything solid. Gabo was fixated by
“negative space”, by the idea that
volume can be achieved without
using solid mass.
Near by is his very earliest kinetic
artwork: a rod that, at the push of
a button, starts to vibrate and so
create an immaterial form. His most
beautiful pieces are probably those in
which tautly strung meshes of nylon
weave shimmering vaults, waves and
tunnels out of thin air with their
threads. Among the most fascinating
may be his unrealised architectural
plans for Stalin’s Palace of the Soviets
— with rooftop helipad. It looks like
some futuristic sci-fi dream of the
1970s; for Star Trek perhaps.
The most famous of his public
commissions — the iconic 25m-high
steel commission for the Bijenkorf
Building in Rotterdam and the
fountain that he built in front of St
Thomas’ Hospital in London with
spiralling jets of water that created
glittering rotating patterns — are
represented by maquettes.
Soaring, leaping, twisting, curving,
dissolving form feels ever more
ephemeral in sculptures (and a
few paintings) that are always and
quintessentially informed by a sense of
movement. Yet there are works in this
show that are moving in another way.
They are emotionally touching. What
makes this exhibition remarkable, and
so particularly memorable, is the way
that it reveals a gentler, more personal
and more engaged flipside to the lofty
theoretician so obsessed with
modernism’s stern formalities.
The final section, which explores
Gabo’s passion for music, lifts his work
into a spiritual realm. “I started to feel
that space is not around us, space is in
us, that we are all, and everything all
around us is, transparent,” he said.
The exhibition runs to Sept 27A
ll four Tate galleries are
reopening this week. If
you missed seeing them
before lockdown, you now
have your second chance.
Indulge in the stylised fantasies of
Aubrey Beardsley at Tate Britain or
reaquaint yourself with Andy Warhol
at Tate Modern. I joined the holiday
crowds heading for Cornwall to make
the most of a rare opportunity to
admire the work of the pioneering
constructivist Naum Gabo.
In 1939 the Russian-born Gabo
followed Ben Nicholson and Barbara
Hepworth southwestwards and, for six
years during the Second World War,
made his home in Carbis Bay just a
short way along the coast from St Ives.
He and Nicholson volunteered as
air-raid wardens and would patrol
the rocky cliff lines by night.
Gabo was utterly entranced by
flight. His sculptures pay homage
to its aerial beauties; to its freedom
and energy, its dynamism and light.
They set out to capture a sense of an
indwelling energy that can be released
outwards in arcs and parabolas that,
slipping loose of their material
incarnations, soar free into space.
You certainly get a sense of this as
you walk through the Tate show, the
first significant examination of Gabo
to be staged in this country in more
than 30 years. It was prompted by the
centenary of his 1920 proclamation,
the Realistic Manifesto, a statement of
radical beliefs that he and his artistic
brother had printed and managed to
get plastered (all 5,000 copies of it)
across the billboards of Moscow.
In this seminal modernist document
Gabo compares the artist, “with a
plumb line in hand, with eyes as
precise as a ruler, with a spirit as taut
as a compass”, to the engineer who,
eschewing solid mass and static form,
aimed to embody movement, to sculpt
in space and time instead. “We assert
a new element in visual art, KINETIC
RHYTHMS, as the basic forms of our
perceptions of real time,” he stated.
The show focuses on the
architectural creations, the theatrical
designs, the natural inspirations and
the musical passions of a peripatetic
polymath who, born in 1890, the son
of a Siberian foundry owner, studied
medicine, natural sciences, philosophy,
architecture and art.
His transnational career took him
to Berlin, Paris, Oslo, Moscow and
London, then — via St Ives — to
the US, where he died in 1977.
His Head No 2 looms up to greet
you as you enter. Constructed from
huge curved slices of rusting steel, it
could have been carved from the flank
of a ship. Yet this apparently weighty
presence is evoked as much by gaps,Inspired by the beauty
and freedom of flight
Rachel Campbell-
Johnston admires
an exhibition of
work by a radical
Russian sculptor
Head No 2 (c 1916),
enlarged version, 1964,
by Naum Gabo, on
show at Tate St IvesIt’s the
first
significant
UK show
of Naum
Gabo’s art
in 30 years
THE WORK OF NAUM GABO © NINA & GRAHAM WILLIAMS/TATE, 2019The theatre is
booking local
actors who live
in social bubbles
at the Minack Theatre, which is reopening to limited audiences