Vladimir Radunsky

Vladimir Radunsky (1 March 1954 – 11 September 2018) was a Russian-born American artist, designer, author and illustrator who lived in Rome.

Life and work Born in the Russian city of Perm, Vladimir Radunsky grew up in Moscow where he studied fine art, design and architecture. In 1973, he studied at the Moscow Architectural Institute. In 1982, he emigrated to New York, became a US citizen, and continued his work as a graphic designer, producing mainly art books and children's books.

Radunsky produced very different types of books, such as a book of shapes for young readers, Square Triangle Round Skinny (a set of four books shaped the way their titles suggest); Discovery, a lyrical poem by Nobel-prize winner Joseph Brodsky about the discovery of America, and What Does Peace Feel Like?, a compilation of conversations with children during school visits in the US and Europe. His interactive book, Le Grand Bazar, subtitled For people with imagination age 5 to 105 (published in Paris by Edition du Panama), requires the reader to use scissors, pen, and stapler. Boy Meets Girl is to be read forward, backward, upside down and inside out. The Mighty Asparagus (Harcourt) combines the works of Italian Renaissance painters with his own paintings in a collage. The Hip-Hop Dog, written by Chris Raschka (HarperCollins), is hip-hop poetry for children, where graffiti art has migrated from walls into a printed book.

For his exhibition at Milanese gallery Nina Due and, subsequently, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, Radunsky presented a unique collection of clothes for animals. Among the works that he designed were an anaconda's wedding dress, a horse's riding breeches, and a hippo's bathing trunks.

For the new production of the ballet Don Quixote at the Roman Teatro dell'Opera's 2017–2018 season, Radunsky created the set and costumes. The libretto, originally created in the middle of the nineteenth century by the French Choreographer Marius Petipa, inspired Radunsky to design the set as an enormous pop-up book.

Death and family Having been diagnosed with multiple myeloma years earlier, Radunsky died at a hospital near his home in Rome at the age of 64. He and his wife Eugenia Uritsky, whom he married in 1987, had two daughters and moved to Italy when the children were young because he wanted "to be surrounded by beautiful things".