posted 06-04-2018 11:20 AM               

Space Cover 469: Alexey Leonov: Cosmonaut and Artist

Last week was 84th anniversary of Alexey Leonov and I decided to make a small post dedicated to him. Well, Leonov is one of the most well-known spacemen and you all have some or many items in your collections related to him, so I do not count on surprising anyone or revealing some amazing story. The subject of this post in pure artistic, I am going to talk about his paintings and their trace in astrophilately.

In mid-late 1960s Leonov teamed with fantasy artist Andrey Sokolov and created a series of paintings that were published in space related albums and reproduced on stamps. The first album was issued in 1967 – "Stars, wait for us!" with foreword written by Yuri Gagarin. The same year the first stamps with their joint paintings dedicated to Cosmonautics Day, have seen the light followed by five stamps Space Fantasy, later the same year.

The most famous and widely known stamp series is six stamps of "15 Years of Space Age" that were also issued in mini-sheets. The stamps issued in September 1972 used a combination of real-life and fantasy paintings. So in this was the first time such format was used on Soviet stamps and first time a non-government (see it as licensed) artist took part in stamp design.

In 1975 there was another first one – Soyuz Apollo stamp issued in May 1975 with Alexey Leonov painting was the first Soviet space stamp issued BEFORE the actual flight.

In 1980, a very colorful souvenir sheet dedicated to 15th anniversary of first spacewalk based on Leonov artwork.

As far as I know, Alexey Leonov did not take part in cachet design but his painting were widely used.

posted 06-10-2018 12:37 PM               

Leonov came to Houston in July 1973, and Ray asked him to sign this cover. Leonov attached Sc 4011, featuring Leonov's painting of Venera 7 descending to Venus, and then signed across both stamps. And 4011 is one of the set of 6 "15 Years of Space Age" that Efim noted above.