Painter, Sculptor. He is a well-recognized Russian-Jewish painter and sculptor of the early 20th century, who was also a book illustrator and theatrical design producer. He studied painting at the School of Art in Odessa in the Ukraine from 1901 to 1907, at the same time attending classes in sculpture. From 1908 to 1909, he made a series of paintings using a technique of only dots of paint called pointillist. He visited Vienna and Munich in 1910 before going to Paris, where he worked at Vasil'yeva's Free Russian Academy until 1912, producing paintings on Jewish themes and studying Cubism. His first masterpiece was the 1911 "Jewish Funeral." In 1912 he went to Saint Petersburg, where he painted a number of Cubist portraits, for example another masterpiece, a portrait of poet Anna Akhmatova. His Cubist work makes much use of faceting and transparent planes. From 1918 to 1921 he taught at the Department of Visual Arts of Narkompros in Petrograd, but he was criticized for his attempts to identify Futurism with the art of the proletariat. As a sculptor, Al'tman became well-known as the designer of post-Revolutionary mass parades and monuments, for example the celebration of the first anniversary of the Russian Revolution on November 7, 1918, which employed abstract geometric forms on huge panels. In 1920 he created a realistic bronze sculpture of Communist leader, V. I. Lenin, and published an album of sketches of Lenin in the Kremlin. His first solo show was organized in St. Petersburg in 1926. Later in life, he produced the stage designs for Shakespearean plays as well as "The Ten Commandments" and "The Marriage of Trouhadec." In 1928, he traveled with a theater group on its European tour and stayed abroad until 1935, when he returned to the Soviet Union. Besides children's books, he illustrated N. G. Gogol's "Petersburg Stories," published in 1937. During World War II, he published in newspapers caricatures of Nazi leaders such as the Third Reich Minister of Propaganda, Paul Joseph Goebbels. He published essays on art. In 2000 a memorial tablet was placed on his Saint Petersburg home, where he had lived from 1937 till 1970. He married twice; first to a ballerina and second in 1935 to the daughter of author Valentin Ternavtsev. He had no children. Today, at Western European auctions, his works are worth thousands of dollars, yet most of his pieces remain in Russia. In 2012 his portrait of the poet Boris Kornilov sold for nearly $50,000 at Sotheby's in New York City.