Naum Gabo

"Science looks and observes and art see and foresees. Every great scientist has experienced a moment when the artist in him saved the scientist."

"No new artistic system will withstand the pressure of a growing new culture until the very foundation of Art will be erected on the real laws of life. Until all artists will say with us... All is a fiction... only life and its laws are authentic and in life only the active is beautiful and wise and strong and right, for life does not know beauty as an aesthetic measure... efficacious existence is the highest beauty. Life knows neither good nor bad nor justice as a measure of morals... need is the highest and most just of all morals. Life does not know rationally abstracted truths as a measure of cognizance, deed is the highest and surest of truths. Those are the laws of life. Can art withstand these laws if it is built on an abstraction, on mirage, and fiction?..."

"[The Constructive idea..] has revealed a universal law that the elements of a visual art such as lines, colours, shapes, possess their own forces of expression independent of any association with the external aspects of the world; that their life and action are self-conditioned psychological phenomena rooted in human nature; that those elements are not chosen by convention by any utilitarian or other reason as words and figures are, they are not merely abstract signs, but they are immediately and organically bound up with human emotions. The revelation of this fundamental law has opened up a vast field in art giving the possibility of expression to those human impulses and emotions which have been neglected."

"Up to now sculptors have preferred the mass and neglected or paid little attention to such an important component of mass as space.. ..we consider it as an absolute sculptural element. I do not hesitate to affirm that the perception of space is a primary natural sense which belongs to the basic senses of our psychology"

"..adding Space perception to the perception of Masses, emphasizing it and forming it, we enrich the expression of Mass.. ..through the contrast between them whereby Mass retains its solidity and Space its extension."

"What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of Science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts. It is for that reason that I consider morals and aesthetics one and the same; for they cover only one impulse, one drive inherent in our consciousness - to bring our life and all our actions into a satisfactory relationship with the events of the world, as our consciousness want it to be, in harmony with our life and according to the laws of consciousness itself - Naum Gabo"

"There is no indication of success up to now in the bringing together of art and science. To achieve success the artist must be spiritually at home in the field of science so he can think and feel in the same way as the scientist. A spiritual union, not a technical one, is requested."

"We take four planes and we construct with them the same volume as of four tons of mass."

"Either build functional houses and bridges or create pure art or both. Dont confuse one with the other. Such art is not pure constructive art, but merely an imitation of the machine."

"Space and time are the only forms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed... The realisation of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art... We renounce the thousand-year-old delusion in art that held the static rhythms as the only elements of the plastic and pictorial arts. We affirm in these arts a new element, the kinetic rhythms as the basic forms of our perception of real time."

"We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities. I call them images, not in Platos sense (namely that they are only reflections of reality), but I hold that these images are the reality itself and that there is no reality beyond this reality except when in our creative process we change the images: then we have created new realities."

"More often than not, [people] expect a painting to speak to them in terms other than visual, preferably in words, whereas when a painting or a sculpture needs to be supplemented and explained by words it means either that it has not fulfilled its function or that the public is deprived of vision,"