Alexander Labas. At the speed of the XX century "

[SergeiSK]

exhibition "Alexander Labas. At the speed of the XX century" Tretyakov Gallery, says the 110 anniversary of the artist's birth.

In recent years, Alexander Labas was almost the most popular among Moscow's Museum of Soviet artists. Pushkin Museum of Fine Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Gallery PROUNI "- these are just three of the most respected institutions, noting various anniversaries of the artist. Love this clear (active rehabilitation scenic values ​​of Soviet origin now in full swing), but at the same time as something obviously irrational. There are artists more powerful, there masterovitee is renowned, but Labas, as lawless comet flies past all these hierarchies, and settles in writing now recent history of Soviet art separate, but very important line.

From a fairly normal for a Soviet artist's biography - all relying romantic highs 20's, formalistic drop the 30's, craft vegetation 40-50-x, thaw rehabilitation - is to provide several stages.

Alexander Labas was born in Smolensk, then the family lived in Riga and just before the First World was in Moscow. Provincial Jewish boy falls in Imperial Stroganov School, with its rigid system of art drill, a freethinking Moscow, where he was bombarded with Shchukin-Morozov treasures, Ilya Mashkov in his workshop teaches him to Cezanne's formulas, and Petr Konchalovsky, which Labas met in 1918 , bestows a high disease belief in the omnipotence of color.

In the 1920 Labas studies in the Higher Art and then taught there at the invitation of Vladimir Tabor painting, composition, cromatics, and in 1925 became a member of the Society (OST): on the left, in fact, institutions and associations Labas is conservative of the possible positions. While constructivists prick, cut, cut volumes and planes, ostovtsy remain attached to the canvas and brush as the cornerstone. Needless to say, that in 1932, the discharge gd formalists were all together.

Labas - an artist of one mood. Topics he could have like different (work and rest, planes and cars, life on earth and under the earth, rough building and home idyll), but the mood never change: whole Labas - continuous sunshine, happiness and flight. A few awkward subtitle exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery - "At the speed of the twentieth century - just about it. Labas was a happy man - happy with his some very boyish entrancement movement. He still races, flies, rushing, run away, fly away. Moreover, in his world there is no specified arrival - his characters from point A to any point B does not fall. They dissolve in the open is whether the world, or non-existence. The most delicate watercolor paintings are often denied Labasa format paintings as such - the image field is narrowed to form as if through a telescope. This is best understood by the example of his favorite escalators in the subway: Staircase moves from nowhere to nowhere, and the vaults of the tunnel are blurred in a haze sizuyu.

In art history there were several patients with movement artists. Fan of the smoky and scary pieces of iron - steam engines - Turner, lovivshy subtle vibrations of the air under the foot galloping horse Degas, intoxicated Marinetti machine age. Alexander Labas with the same blood. Soaring into the sky one day, he remained committed to the dynamics. Athletes, airplanes, airships, metro, cranes, tramways, soccer ball, still nothing. People living in labasovskih colored dreams, weightless and faceless - the most important thing moving. This impersonal for us is a reflection of the heavy Soviet experience. But for those who wrote in the 20's and 30's, similar material had a special meaning: the new century delights. Romanticism with the artist quickly shaken. But on the canvases he obvorozhitelen until now.
Cyrus Dolinina
magazine Kommersant Power ", № 10 (914), 14.03.2011