Mikhail Mikhailovich Cheremnykh

• Born 1890 · Died 1962

Mikhail Mikhailovich Cheremnykh relocated to Moscow in 1911 to study with Il’ia Mashkov, a painter in the avant-garde Jack of Diamonds group. From 1911 to 1917 he studied with Konstantin Korovin and Sergei Malutin at MUZhViZ. In 1922, he co-founded the satirical magazine Krokodil, and would remain associated with it until his death. He was active as a book illustrator and from 1939 to 1941 worked as the set designer for both the Leningrad Academic Maly Opera Theater and the State Theater of Opera and Ballet in Minsk. When World War II broke out in 1941, he helped organize the TASS studio in Moscow, designing its first poster and eventually contributing over forty. In 1942 he was awarded the Stalin Prize and he received the honorific title People’s Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1952.