Born St. Petersburg, 1891; died Leningrad, 1967

As a young man, Vladimir Vasil’evich Lebedev attended several private art schools in St. Petersburg, publishing his illustrations in magazines as early as 1911. From 1918 to 1921, he was a professor at GSKhM in Petrograd. During the final two years of his appointment, he worked for the Petrograd ROSTA studio. From 1924 to 1933, he served as director of the editorial office of literature for children and youth for the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) in Leningrad, during which time he produced several notable satirical graphic portfolios. In 1931, after having been publicly accused of practicing formalism, Lebedev became the target of a fierce denunciation campaign, which culminated on March 1, 1936, with the appearance of an article in Pravda that attacked the illustrators of children’s books active in Leningrad. He moved to Moscow and designed approximately forty posters for the TASS studio between June 1942 and July 1945. Following the war, Lebedev resumed work as a book illustrator.

_{Vladimir Vasil'evich Lebedev and Dem'ian Bednyi. A Belorussian Landscape, July 31, 1944. Gift of the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.}