A drawing from the 1920s

Laban first trained as an artist. When he was in Munich, he produced cartoons for newspapers to supplement his income.

The archive holds a large number of his original artworks and some copies.

Laban's work falls into several discrete categories:

• a small number of portraits and landscapes in coloured crayon and watercolour
• a great number of cartoons and grotesques which reveal Laban’s considerable humour
• movement studies (illustrated by the three figures seen here).

Some of these drawings are the starting point of studies for spatial movement.

Solid geometry fascinated Laban. He had a gift for representing three-dimensional shapes such as the cube, the octahedron and the icosahedron (a 20-sided solid with equilateral triangle faces).

Within these solids, Laban devised what he called “movement scales that figured pathways”. Laban thought about and explored movement through his drawing.

Dick McCaw

Image credit Leeds University Library