Natalie d’Arbeloff was born to a French mother and Russian father of Jewish heritage in Paris, France, on 7 August 1929. She lived in France, Paraguay, Brazil, Italy and the USA before settling in London in 1963. D’Arbeloff is primarily recognised for her experimental art books and comic book-like forms, and was an art tutor at a number of adult education institutions in London.
Book artist, painter, and teacher Natalie d’Arbeloff was born on 7 August 1929 in Paris, France to a French mother and Russian father of Jewish heritage. Her cosmopolitan upbringing spanned multiple countries, including France, Paraguay, Brazil, Italy, and the USA. Her formal art education began at the Art Students League of New York (1948–49), continued in Mexico at the Instituto Allende (1956–57), and was completed at the Central School of Art in London (1964–66), where she specialised in printmaking. In 1963, she settled permanently in London. Her multi-lingualism and global upbringing, together with her varied education, gave her a rich artistic vocabulary that cuts across mediums and genres.
D’Arbeloff’s practice is both prolific and wide-ranging, encompassing painting, printmaking, book art, cartooning, and writing. A defining trait of her work is its tendency toward hybrid forms: image-text combinations, handmade book-objects, or comic-strip narratives that blend the literary and the visual. From the early 1970s, she produced a series of livres d’artiste through her own imprint, NdA Press. These works - crafted in tiny editions or unique copies - integrated her skills in etching, collagraphy, relief printing, and design. Notable among these are The Word Accomplished (1974), Fungus and Curmudgeonly (1980), Love (1992), The Revelation of Saint John the Divine (1999), and Trans-Siberian Prosody and Little Jeanne from France (2015), the latter created in collaboration with the Old Stile Press. Her bookworks are deeply experimental, exploring themes such as spirituality, mythology, language, and the absurd. Equally central is her alter-ego, Augustine, who is a fictional persona she developed through comics and mini-books. The Augustine series, published under the title Small Packages (1984–88), combines deadpan humour with philosophical inquiry, positioning d’Arbeloff as a forerunner in feminist cartooning.
Her visual language is both ironic and expressive. In her painted and mixed-media work, bodies are exaggerated and stylised, often challenging conventional standards of beauty and narrative coherence. Recurring motifs include naked or semi-clad women - sometimes sexual, sometimes ironic - and hybrid creatures that collectively reclaim the female gaze. These figures are frequently set in theatrical, stage-like environments that may be domestic or fantastical. Elements are arranged in constructed or diorama-like spaces, blending pop surrealism with psychoanalytic undertones and often accompanied by comic-style speech bubbles. Across her paintings, artist books and cartoons, d’Arbeloff’s work navigates a tension between intimacy and performance, as well as internal reflection and public display. Her compositions often engage with philosophical questions through playful visual metaphors, evoking a sense of childlike wonder while retaining intellectual depth. Visually, her oeuvre resists categorisation. Drawing on both modernist abstraction and comic-book narration, her work creates a disjunctive and surreal atmosphere. Flattened perspectives, patterned interiors, and the integration of text produce an uncanny theatricality that prompts viewers to question the boundaries between fiction and confession. Whether through hand-printed bookworks or painted shadow boxes, d’Arbeloff’s art remains defiantly independent, witty, and unafraid to be vulnerable.
Throughout her career, d’Arbeloff maintained a strong commitment to education. Between the 1960s and 1990s, she taught across adult education institutions in London, including Camden Arts Centre, City Lit, and the Stanhope Institute. Austrian émigré artist, Helga Michie, was her student at the City Lit. She also taught abroad, including as a visiting artist at Colorado College in the 1990s. Her pedagogical ethos was grounded in the belief that creativity is a universal human potential and accessible to individuals, regardless of age, background or prior training. She authored several art and design books and led workshops that encouraged creative experimentation and interdisciplinary thinking.
In addition to her achievements in visual art and education, d’Arbeloff received several awards and public commissions. While living in Paraguay in the early 1960s, she won a national competition to design a mural for the newly built Hotel Guarani: an abstract, modernist piece inaugurated in 1962. In 2007, she received the inaugural Mary Stott Prize from The Guardian newspaper, where she guest-edited its women’s pages. Later, in 2019, she was awarded the Laydeez Do Comics Rosalind B. Penfold prize for her graphic novel-in-progress Double Entendre, recognised as the best entry from an artist over the age of 50. Her work has been exhibited widely, with a major retrospective held at the Museum Meermanno in The Hague in 1992. In 2019, on the occasion of her 90th birthday, she spoke to the The Guardian about her experiences with agism: ‘I doubt I would have clung so stubbornly to this phobia of admitting my age if patronising preconceptions about ageing didn’t exist,’ (d’Arbeloff, 2019). Natalie d’Arbeloff continues to live and work in London and is a member of the Society of Designer Craftsmen. In the UK public domain, her artist’s books are held in the British Library, the Tate Gallery Library and the V&A.