Alexander Arkadevich Labas

The canvas has been striplined. There is a layer of surface dirt and small areas of media staining in places. There are visible stretcher marks at the edges. There are areas of craquelure and flecks of paint loss in places throughout, notably in a few areas along the upper edge and near the frame on the road in the lower left and lower right edges. There is a small area of damage in the lower right corner and the canvas has been slightly dented from the reverse here. There are two areas of scratching to the canvas: in the lower right corner and in the lower left corner. UV light reveals a small area of retouching above the towers on the far right and also in the top left corner. There are a few minor flecks of reotuching elsewhere. Held in a gold painted wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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The technological advancements of Soviet cities appealed strongly to Labas. Metro escalators, aerodromes, piers and railway siding all feature prominently in his work; in the present view of Moscow it is the stream of cars, roads and bridges which are the nominal subject. But these urban landscapes paintings are rarely purely architectural or wholly depopulated. Almost always he includes promenading couples, a blurred clutch of spectators or the characteristic mass of colourful figures that stream along the pavements in the present work - and it is this that carries much of the appeal of his work today. The deft strokes that come to represent a crowd n Labas' work recall the so-called 'matchstick men' that people the industrial districts of Northern English towns in the work of Laurence Lowry (1887 –1976), another key observer of daily urban life in the early 20th century, albeit in a very different capitalist context.

 

Labas was a member of the Society of Easel Painters, 'a deliberately provocative name designed to distance the group from the Constructivists who had more or less abandoned painting altogether'.  (I.Samarine, Russian Drawings and Watercolours, 2011, p.126).  The bright flourishes in the present work look forward to a more peaceful future following the end of the World War II, which Labas had represented in his series, Moscow During the War, in which the usually harmonious nature of his work inevitably gave way to anxious overtones. In wartime he would stand guard during air raid alarms on the roof of his house, and on finishing his shift, set to work immediately to paint his impressions of planes, fires, soldiers and the besieged city. The apparently mundane aspect of the present composition belies the deep relief of a city at last at peace, the Kremlin intact. As Butorina writes in her monograph on the artist, 'When analysing Labas' work, one cannot look simply at the image on the canvas. The work contains deep subtext. All of Labas' works are dedicated to daily events, but they often have a depth which is noticeable particularly on second observation and encompass not only what the artist has depicted in the painting, but also his surrounding reality'. (E.Butorina, Alexandr Arkadevich Labas, Moscow: Sovetsky khudozhnik, 1979, p.14).

 

The State Tretyakov Gallery held a retrospective of Labas' work in 2010, Alexander Labas: For Speed of the XXth Century.