“Above the tempests of our weekdays, Across the ashes and cindered homes of the past, Before the gates of the vacant future…” so begins the thunderous Realistic Manifesto, a radical proclamation written in Moscow in 1920 by two of the most striking proponents of the Constructivist movement, Antoine Pevsner and his younger brother, Naum Gabo. “The impasse into which Art has come to in the last twenty years must be broken.” While Pevsner’s creations can be viewed in major international museums, including MoMA and The Tate Gallery, high-quality sculptures appear on the market relatively infrequently. A cast of Le Lis noir has not appeared on the open market for 40 years; the present cast was acquired directly from the artist and has remained in the same family since 1959.

As Herbert Read noted in his introduction to the joint Gabo/Pevsner exhibition at MoMA in 1948, much of the art that is termed “modern” is in the nature of a protestation, a form of negative reaction to the decadence of civilization: “But the art of Antoine Pevsner and of Naum Gabo is positive and prophetic and it looks beyond the immediate convulsions of our epoch to a time when a new culture based on an affirmative vision of life will need and will call into being an art commensurate with its grandeur." (Herbert Read, Naum Gabo [and] Antoine Pevsner (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1948, n.p.).

The overarching aim of the Constructivists was to extend the spatial range of conventional sculpture, to suggest by implied motion and directional forms the relationship between space and time. Instead of creating sculpture through the traditional methods of carving or modeling with clay, the brothers constructed three-dimensional art objects. Art was inspiration controlled by mathematics, as Pevsner put it. They frequently used the new materials of modern industry: Gabo (who changed his name so as not to be confused with his brother), worked in plastics and other materials, whereas Pevsner chiefly in metals.

The visual language of original art, whether the music of Stravinsky, the poetry of Eliot, or the sculpture of the Constructivists, is as “difficult” to learn as any verbal language, argues Read, but that should not deter. “In philosophy or science—the 'difficulty' of Heidegger or Carnap—is accepted as a necessary, or at least as a natural, price to pay...There is no imprecision of visual language in a construction by Gabo or Pevsner: every piece has the absolute clarity of a Euclidian theorem. The development of both artists, during the past twenty-five years, is towards an increasingly exact equivalence of vision and expression.” ((Herbert Read, ibid., n.p.).