Meeting of Komsomol Members with the Crimean Peasants 1930

Eugene Lanceray made this painting, 'Meeting of Komsomol Members with the Crimean Peasants', with oil paint and a brush, imagining an encounter of people in a landscape. The paint looks thin and washy, a bit like watercolor. I can imagine him dabbing the brush to create the figures, and the landscape too. Look how the gestures of the people sort of echo the gestures of the landscape behind them. Those big mountain forms have the same energy as the reaching arms and pointing fingers. I wonder what Lanceray thought about while he painted this? I imagine it was a challenge to put people together in an allegorical scene, full of hope, which has to be staged, but also feel real. The way the paint almost dissolves feels kind of modern, like Impressionism, but the figures feel more old-fashioned. Painters are always in conversation with one another across time, working through the problem of how to make a painting mean something, and Lanceray offers us one solution. It is like a record of his thinking and feeling that continues to generate new thoughts and feelings in others.