PEVSNER, ANTOINE

born Jan. 18, 1886, Oryol, Russia died April 12, 1962, Paris, France Russian-born French sculptor and painter who-like his brother, Naum Gabo (q.v.)-advanced the Constructivist style, which employs such materials as metal, glass, and wire and eschews mass in favour of space intervals and a sense of movement. Pevsner studied art in Kiev, went to Paris in 1911 and 1913, and in 1915 joined his brother Naum in Oslo, where they experimented in art that was "capable of utilizing emptiness and liberating us from the compact mass." The brothers returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and Pevsner became a professor at Moscow's school of fine arts. In 1920 they issued the "Realist Manifesto" of Constructivism, championing their form of art, which they exhibited that year. In 1923 Pevsner left Russia and settled in Paris. A naturalized Frenchman by 1930, he was cofounder and later honorary president of the Ralits Nouvelles group of exhibiting artists. Pevsner produced primarily sculpture after 1923. His early sculptures used zinc, brass, copper, and celluloid, but later he relied mainly on parallel arrays of bronze wire soldered together to form plates. These plates are joined together to form intricate and convoluted shapes using both straight and curved lines. Pevsner was the finest Constructivist sculptor, and he succeeded in infusing that somewhat impersonal geometric style with his own feeling for form.