Spiralling tributes to air, flight and lift-off: Naum Gabo at Tate St Ives reviewed

‘Plunderers of the air’, Naum Gabo called the Luftwaffe planes. In Cornwall, during the second world war, Gabo kept cuttings of the attacks over London. One newspaper photo, pasted in his diary, was taken from the Golden Gallery of St Paul’s after a night of incendiary bombs. London looks like Pompeii. Enemy planes were a betrayal.

Gabo was entranced by flight. His sculptures are spiralling tributes to air, light and lift-off. After an hour in the Naum Gabo retrospective at Tate St Ives, the first major show of the artist’s work for more than 30 years, you feel a certain springiness about the knees as if you could push off Porthmeor Beach and fly. The Icarus effect.

Born Nehemiah Pevsner in south-west Russia in 1890, Gabo studied medicine, natural sciences and philosophy in Munich, before returning to Russia in 1917 where he practised as an artist in the all-things-possible period that followed the Russian Revolution.