Boris Artzybasheff

Boris Artzybasheff was a successful commercial and graphic artist known for his powerful graphic style and often surreal, or bizarre and dreamlike, images. Son of Mikhail Artsybashev, a writer of fiction flouting social conventions, Artzybasheff was born in the city of Kharkov, in the Ukraine. His early art studies in St. Petersburg, Russia, were disrupted by the Russian Revolution of 1917. After a brief stint in the Russian White Army, he immigrated in 1919 to New York City, where he settled. Artsybashev took on a variety of graphic design and commercial art work. He eventually secured several commissions to paint murals in New York restaurants, which led to work designing stage sets for Michael Fokine's Russian Ballet. He found his niche in book and magazine illustration, however. His first book illustrations appeared in 1922; his illustrations for Indian-born author Dhan Gopal Mukerji's children's book Gay-Neck, The Story of a Pigeon received a Newberry Medal in 1928. Artzybasheff eventually illustrated nearly fifty fiction and nonfiction books, some of which he wrote himself.  His best-known book, As I See (1954), features bizarre illustrations that caricature psychoanalytic theory and satirize politics, along with presenting his "machinalia"—anthropomorphized machines and tools.

Artzybasheff had a remarkable graphic facility for crisply contrasting dark and light passages in carefully composed images. His striking illustrations range from the heroically grand to the idiosyncratically humorous. Notwithstanding his prolific work as a book illustrator, he was most celebrated for his sustained tenure as a Time Magazine cover artist. Between 1941 and 1965, he memorably portrayed some of the most important figures in modern history, including Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Lyndon B. Johnson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Ho Chi Minh. Artzybasheff also provided illustrations for Life and Fortune magazines, in addition to devising numerous advertisements for Xerox, Shell Oil, Pan Am, and many other companies.  His work as a painter and printmaker was overshadowed by his contributions to magazine art and commercial advertising design. Artzybasheff's extensive archives are on deposit at the Syracuse University Library Special Collections.