In November 1950, as a cold front from Siberia descended over North Korea’s Chosin Reservoir, the temperature plunged to −36°F. Lambro Ahlas, a 23-year-old Marine from Berkeley, California, huddled from the chill of the night. He was one of 30,000 United Nations troops being surrounded by 120,000 Chinese soldiers as they descended through the rugged mountains towards his camp.
“Lord, if I survive,” he prayed. “Please don’t take my arms.” More than anything Ahlas wanted to be able to paint again.
As the cold front turned into one of the worst blizzards of the century, his unit prepared to fight their way out. The ferociousness of the ensuing battle was described as “a chain gang of zombies.” There were nearly 19,000 UN casualties from intense fighting, sometimes hand-to-hand combat, while many others fell victim to the freezing cold.
As one of the few survivors, Ahlas would be known in US military lore as a hero of the “Frozen Chosin,” yet for him the only glory of war was living through it.
His prayer had been answered, and he would go on to make his mark on the world as an artist.
A life devoted to painting
For the next 70 years, he drew and painted as if each day was his last, eventually exhibiting his work throughout the United States and in Europe. His paintings and drawings have been displayed in museums, featured in prominent galleries, and are held in private collections around the globe.
Despite his success, Ahlas was driven by the belief that his art was underappreciated and that his place in art history had not yet been solidified.
His passing, on November 3, 2021, at the age of 94, in Athens, Greece, marks the beginning of a new chapter of his story—recognition of the timelessness of his art.
From Oakland to Athens
Born on August 1, 1927, in Oakland, California, to Harry and Crystal Ahlas, Lambro was raised in Berkeley, California. Discovered in his youth for his precocious drawing ability, he was admitted on a special scholarship to the California College of Arts and Crafts before attending Berkeley High School, where he would later graduate in 1945. He was further trained at New York’s American Art School.
After the war, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Ahlas lived in New York City before making his way to Southern Europe, painting and drawing, mostly in Italy, Greece, and the Mediterranean islands, before settling in Athens, Greece. There he married his wife Helen and raised his daughter Crystal.
The visible world
Along the way, he sketched people and places, landscapes and seascapes, developing a palette fusing rich green, blue, and yellow blends of intense, vivid color that became his signature. As he matured, he focused on compositions of women. His subjects would be centered on the canvas, often sitting on a bed, lying down, gazing out of a window, or reclining alone. While the poses were straightforward, Ahlas’s process was slow and laborious. His canvas was often textured with thick layers of paint over which brushstrokes rendered lines—sometimes glancing, sometimes firm—depicting melancholy expressions of women staring out into the world. Their delicate hands often conveyed something altogether different up close than from afar, bringing a sense of movement and fluidity to his work. No painting was ever quite finished, as dates would often be crossed out next to his signature, spanning five, 10, even 20 years for some of his most beloved pieces.
A realist among abstraction
While the unconventional and eccentric art of Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, and Andy Warhol flourished during the mid-20th century, Ahlas identified as a realist, always focusing on ordinary people in everyday surroundings in his work.
His friend and mentor Raphael Soyer (Dec. 25, 1899–Nov. 4, 1987), with whom he trained in Manhattan, once wrote, “Lambro Ahlas began to paint at a time when Abstract Expressionism was extolled above all other trends in art. Tradition and representation particularly began to be ignored… It was not easy for a young artist like Ahlas to start his career at such a time, for he never succumbed to the enticement of the aesthetics of abstraction, nor to the recognition awarded its practitioners. From the very beginning Ahlas’s aim was to represent and interpret the visible world—people, landscapes, still-lifes.”
Ahlas, in his earnest yet humorous way, railed against what he called “the strokes, splashes and smears” that made up the abstract art of his day, claiming the “contrivances and pyrotechnics used are the end in themselves.”
In true painting, he said, the technique is always a means to the end.
Faith in tradition
Believing firmly in a foundational set of skills with drawing at the core, Ahlas saw himself as part of a tradition of art and artists that harkened back to the ancient Greeks. Basic humanity, he insisted, has not changed.
“The profundity and eternal beauty of the classic Greek friezes, so universal and human, can still be felt by all. Masaccio’s Adam and Eve is just as valid, powerful and true a representation of the many dilemmas that beset mankind today as it was in his own times,” he wrote. “The mysteries of Botticelli’s Primavera are still to be appreciated and looked upon in wonder because the mysteries of life have not yet been answered.”
Only in recent times, he maintained, have the terms ‘life’ and ‘reality’ been used in contempt in their capacity to capture the human struggle through art.
Recognition beyond a lifetime
As part of the fulfillment of his prayer back at the Chosin Reservoir, Ahlas believed that his devotion to depicting the natural world would eventually be rewarded; that he would someday be recognized as a master, whether during his lifetime or beyond it.
Among his many paintings are works that he compared to 19th- and early-20th-century painters such as Edgar Degas, Impressionist painter of ballerinas, or Paul Gauguin, known for depicting local people and landscapes in French Polynesia.
“Edgar Degas would like this piece,” he once said to me, holding up one of his paintings of a blonde woman, sitting on a bed, wearing a white transparent robe. He explained how the painting “worked” even though the pose and proportions of the woman depicted defied nature. Her neck was too long, her torso unnaturally twisted, and her hands up close appeared to have seven fingers. But he was right. It looked perfectly natural from every angle. Then he would open a book from his shelf and show an example of a Degas painting depicting a child with what up close appeared to be an irregular arm framed by a tripod with only two legs. “See,” he would say. “It works.”
Ahlas is survived by his grandson Andrew Brooks and brother George Ahlas.