Aleksey Laptev

Aleksei Mikhailovich Laptev was a graphic artist, book illustrator, and poet. Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Arts. Honored Artist of the RSFSR.

He lived in Moscow. He studied at F. I. Rerberg’s School-Studio (1923) in Moscow, and with P. I. Lvov and N. N. Kupreyanov at VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN (1924–1929/1930). From 1925 he worked as a graphic illustrator for a number of magazines. He collaborated with publishing houses in Moscow. He was the author of instructional books for art institutions of higher education. In 1944 he was awarded a First Degree Diploma by the Committee for Arts under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR for the cycle of drawings “War Series” (1942–1943). He took part in exhibitions, including many republican, all-Union, and foreign ones; solo exhibitions: 1938, 1949, Moscow. Member of the Union of Artists. Awarded USSR medals. He created illustrations for works of classical Russian and Soviet literature, including books for children. He worked in easel graphics on contemporary and historical themes, as well as in small-form sculpture. He collaborated with the magazine Fun Pictures from the time of its founding. He wrote poems and published several children’s books with his own illustrations. The last reissue of one of A. M. Laptev’s books was in 2010.

It was to him that Dunno first allowed himself to be drawn. And the portrait turned out so similar to the original that all subsequent “portraitists” merely repeated and played upon the image created by A. M. Laptev.

The pen-and-watercolor drawings by A. M. Laptev not only adorned the first two parts of Nosov’s trilogy; as Yuri Olesha accurately observed in his review of The Adventures of Dunno and His Friends, they подчеркнули “its lightness, its joyful, summer, we might say, field-like color.” In addition, Y. Olesha noted that the whole book resembles a round dance: “an entire round dance of adventures, jokes, inventions.” This association arose in the reviewer, without a doubt, thanks to A. M