Vladimir Konashevich

Vladimir Mikhailovich Konashevich (1888–1963) was a Russian artist and illustrator.

Vladimir Konashevich was born in Novocherkassk; soon after his birth, the family moved to Moscow, and later, in 1897, when his father, a bank employee, quarreled with his superiors, they moved again, this time to Chernihiv. There Vladimir graduated from a technical school and took private painting lessons.

In 1908 he entered the architectural department of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, later transferring to the painting department. After graduating, he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he organized exhibitions, restored Pavlovsk Palace, decorated the Yusupov Palace and other mansions of the city.

In 1918 Konashevich created his first book illustrations. These were for An Alphabet in Drawings, which the artist originally sketched in letters addressed to his four-year-old daughter. In the same year he illustrated The Pink Alphabet by E. Solovyova. He then turned his attention to literature for adults, creating illustrations for Bezhin Meadow and First Love by Ivan Turgenev, Marriage by Nikolai Gogol, White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and a collection of poems by Afanasy Fet. All of these illustrations were executed in different graphic techniques, as if Konashevich were searching for his own style and inventing his own visual language.

Alongside his illustration work, during this same period (1918–1926) Konashevich served as assistant curator of the Pavlovsk Palace Museum, compiled guidebooks to Pavlovsk, and taught at the Academy of Arts. From 1921 to 1930 he headed a lithography workshop and produced many accomplished works in the lithographic technique himself.

Beginning in the 1920s, he worked extensively and actively in children’s books, effectively dedicating the rest of his life to them. He frequently changed techniques, moved between children’s and adult literature, shifted constantly from one project to another, and led an extremely active creative life. In addition to book illustration, he collaborated with children’s magazines, painted portraits and landscapes, organized exhibitions, defended a doctoral dissertation in art history, and devoted much time to teaching, working both as an instructor and workshop head at the School of Folk Art (1916–1919) and at the Academy of Arts (1921–1930, 1944–1948).

Many of Vladimir Konashevich’s works received prizes and awards.

“A child is a realist, even an excessively consistent one. A child demands that an object be depicted accurately and with all its defining features, yet depicted simply and clearly: no clutter, nothing obscuring the image, but no omissions either.”