Yakovlev Vladimir I. is a grandson of the famous artist M.N. Yakovlev. Since 1937, the family lived in Moscow, since 1949, he worked as a supervisor of a photographic library, a colour correction artist in the publishing house «Iskusstvo». In 1957, he began to draw under the influence of art exhibitions related to the World Youth Festival held in Moscow that year. He was on friendly terms with so-called underground artists and exhibited his works together with them. In 1984, when his mother died, he was taken to a psychoneurological boarding school.
In any other country, Yakovlev would be considered a classic outsider artist, since both his fate and acute expressive-intense sound of his works (portraits and compositions with separate flowers), as well as his complete dissimilarity with the mainstream trends give considerable reason to treat his art in outsider terms. But since in Russia of the 1970s-1980s, there was not a concept like this, Yakovlev’s art is inscribed in the history of the underground. During his lifetime his works were repeatedly exhibited in the exhibition hall of the Joint Committee of Graphic Artists in M. Gruzinskaya Street in Moscow. The works are included in all the great retrospectives and publications devoted to the underground (Another Art, 1990-91, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum and others).
