Esphyr Slobodkina

Esphyr Slobodkina (1908-2002) was a Russian-American artist whose distinctive contributions to American modernism spanned painting, sculpture, collage, and beloved children's book illustration. Born in Chelyabinsk, Siberia, she fled the upheavals of the Russian Revolution with her family, eventually settling in New York in 1928 after several years in Manchuria. She pursued her artistic training at the National Academy of Design, where the conservative curriculum proved less consequential to her development than the connections she formed with fellow young modernists.

Slobodkina became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936, joining Ilya Bolotowsky (to whom she was briefly married), Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, Werner Drewes, and other pioneers who established abstract art as a serious force in American culture. Her mature paintings and collages combined the geometric vocabulary of European Constructivism with a warm personal sensibility, and she extended her practice into constructed relief sculptures and assemblages that anticipated concerns of later American art by decades.

Slobodkina is also widely beloved as the author and illustrator of Caps for Sale, the classic 1940 children's book about a peddler and a troupe of mischievous monkeys. This picture book, produced in her distinctive flat, boldly patterned graphic style, has remained continuously in print and has introduced generations of children to modernist design sensibilities. She wrote and illustrated more than twenty additional children's books throughout her career.

Slobodkina worked from her studios in New York and Great Neck for many decades, and she established the Slobodkina Foundation to preserve her legacy. Her paintings and constructions are held in the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, and other major American collections.