Painter and illustrator
Vladimir Lebedev
The pioneer who gave Soviet picture books their bold, flat, cut-paper look.
On Picturepops™ cards · 4
The life
1891–1967Born St Petersburg, Russia
Vladimir Lebedev began painting postcards for a St Petersburg shop at fourteen, drew posters after the Revolution, and in the 1920s invented a new kind of children’s book, built from flat shapes and bright colour. With the poet Samuil Marshak he made more than a dozen picture books, and as art editor of the children’s section of the State Publishing House in Leningrad he trained a whole generation of illustrators. Our cards include The Poodle, from his 1927 book with Marshak, and three circus pictures of 1925: Acrobat on One Wheel, Jumbo the Drummer and Tightrope Violinist.