Alexandre Arkadevich Labas

Alexandre Arkadevich Labas was born on 19 February 1900, Old Style (3 March 1900, New Style), in Smolensk, in the Russian Empire. His early training began in the private studio of V. Mushketov in Smolensk. The family later moved to Moscow, where Labas studied at the Stroganov Central Art and Industrial School and in the private studios of F. I. Rerberg and I. I. Mashkov, before completing his training at VKhUTEMAS, the Higher Art and Technical Studios, in the early 1920s. Sources vary on the exact years and additional instructors, and those details have not been fully confirmed here.

In the mid-1920s he became a founding member of OST, the Society of Easel Painters, a group of Moscow artists who sought a modern, urban subject matter for easel painting. Airships, airplanes, trains, and the newly built Moscow metro became his recurring subjects, rendered in a style critics have described as a distinctly Soviet vision of speed and the future.

His work was shown internationally during the interwar period, including in a 1929 touring exhibition of Soviet art in the United States and at the 1937 Paris and 1939 New York world's fairs. In 1976 he was named an Honored Artist of the RSFSR. Labas died on 30 August 1983 in Moscow and was buried at Vagankovskoye Cemetery. A major retrospective at the State Tretyakov Gallery's Krymsky Val building opened in March 2011, and his work has continued to appear in Russian and international museum exhibitions since, including a 2022 show at the Museum of St. Petersburg Art of the 20th and 21st Centuries and a 2024 to 2025 solo exhibition, Age of Calm and Anxiety, at SAAS Gallery in London.

Labas is consistently framed by museums and art historians as a central, original figure of the Moscow avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, distinguished within OST for an almost cinematic treatment of flight, transport, and the modernizing Soviet city. His 2011 Tretyakov Gallery retrospective and subsequent museum shows have reinforced his place as an important but still under-researched painter of Soviet modernity, and institutions from the State Tretyakov Gallery to the State Russian Museum hold his work in their permanent collections. Commentary on his practice repeatedly returns to his recurring imagery of airships, airplanes, and trains as a way of picturing technological optimism and unease at once, though the dossier consulted for this profile did not turn up an exact, attributable critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet that could be reproduced verbatim.

Labas's auction market is small and unevenly documented compared with his institutional stature. The best-supported figure is an auction record of USD 360,000, reported as having been set at a London auction in 2012; the specific work, auction house, and calendar date of that sale are not confirmed in available sources. No exclusive commercial gallery currently represents him; his estate is managed by his family through the Alexander Labas Foundation, which lends works to museums and organizes exhibitions on a project basis, alongside occasional shows at galleries such as SAAS Gallery in London and secondary-market activity through dealers such as PV Gallery.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Labas, and authentication depends on the archive maintained by the Alexander Labas Foundation together with documentation from the major museums that hold his work. His auction history is thin, with only one well-reported six-figure result, and the exact work, house, and date behind his reported USD 360,000 record have not been independently confirmed, so any auction-based valuation should be treated with caution. Because there is no single gallery with exclusive representation, provenance and family or foundation documentation matter more than usual when evaluating a work attributed to him.