How a Soviet artist glorified the sky & high speeds (PICS)

For him, airships, airplanes, train cars and the subway were a kind of exotic animals of the new world, which the artist admired. A special view of what was happening – from above, as if from a pilot's cabin – appeared in his childhood. “Our balcony offered a wonderful view of Voznesenskaya Mountain and towards the Dnieper and Zadneprovye rivers. It was a breathtaking picture: a tram, cabbies and draft horses were rushing down the mountain below. People were going up and down all the time.”

Labas admitted that he was interested in the rhythm of movement. He painted “high-speed trains, airplanes, people in the cabins, trying to convey the unknown state of a person in flight”.

The artist once said he would remember his first plane trip for the rest of his life. “The plane took off and I felt how it left the ground. It was the first strange and not entirely pleasant sensation. But, the next moment, I saw how everything on the ground began to shrink and then a wonderful panorama of Moscow opened up. <…> The clouds appeared close by, they were rushing with amazing speed in the opposite direction from the airplane. But then, they suddenly descended sharply downward and quickly began to cover the landscape. I wanted to see at least something else on the land that had become so distant, but everything was covered with a milky white fog, which reminded me of a white canvas… I stopped feeling time.”

‘Morning at the Airfield’, 1928

‘In Flight’, 1935

‘Metro’, 1935

‘In the Cockpit of an Airplane’, 1928

‘They’re Riding’, 1928

‘Airship’, 1931

‘City Square’, 1926

‘City of the Future’, 1935

‘The first train on the Turksib’, 1931

*You can see even more of the artist’s works at the ‘Weightlessness. Alexander Labas on Speed, Progress and Love’ exhibition in the New Jerusalem Museum, which runs until May 25, 2025.