Naum Pavlovich Karpovskii was a noted Soviet painter and a graphic artist from Kharkov. Until 1941, he lived and worked in Kharkov but during World War II, he moved to Alma-Ata (Almaty), the capital of the Kazakh SSR. From 1925 to 1931, Karpovskii studied at the State Art Institute of Kharkov where he later served as an instructor. By the 1930s, he was designing political posters. When the threat war loomed over the Soviet Union during the late 1930...

Iskusstvo was the Art Publishing House (A.K.A. Visual Arts Publishing) that was created in 1936 from Ogiz-Izogiz (State Art and Literature Publishing House). It disseminated books and journals dealing with graphic design and the fine arts, and it issued numerous posters. Since the Iskusstvo banner was part of the State Printing Works in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and Moscow, its two main offices were located in those two cities.