The artist is Labas
In 1919, Alexander Labas left state free art workshops organized on the basis of the Stroganov school, and volunteered for the front. “Ahead is an unknown, new events, new impressions. I was eighteen years old “. This entry explains the act of a young artist as a romantic impulse to physically feel, measure the space of a “ugly” country, and be present at the birth of the future. Together with his comrades in the brigade of the artists of the Political Department of the 3rd Army of the Eastern Front, Labas wrote posters, banners, designed a campaign train.
Later, in 1928, he will write a picture “In the Far East. Red Armyman “, a lyrical portrait of his generation. A fragile, intelligent Jewish young man in a dusty helmet-Budenovka with a dark silhouette froze against the backdrop of snowy foggy Dali. The cinematic influx is close to the viewer a dense, closed figure. It seems to be cut, mounted in a almost ethereal landscape running in the distance. In the gaze directed inside, in the pose of a young man, constrained by a rough overcoat, as if hidden in it, is a fascinated detachment. He is not so much present as he dreams, recalls, sees people under construction in the columns of people, at home, rushing in the distance, circling in Bees, as if also a snowy sky, airplanes. The image of a “book boy”, whose dreams have gained a living colorful flesh, is a kind of artist’s manifesto. In it, he collected the main images of his work and approved himself by the creator of his own world, the material for which is the reality missed through himself. Today, the vicissitudes of the Civil War in the Far East amaze us with cruelty and tragedy. The artist was their witness, but in his work we will not find their reflection. “We peered intently into the present and represented the fiction of the future,” the words said by Labas reflect the attitude of the young generation of creators of the post -revolutionary era.
