Alexander Dobkin, painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, lecturer, and teacher, was born in Genoa, Italy on May 1, 1908. He immigrated to the United States in 1920 with his parents. His father, Dmitry Dobkin, was an operatic tenor and founder of the Brooklyn Free Musical Society and the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra.  

Alexander Dobkin studied at the City College of New York and the Art Students League under the mentorship of George Bridgeman and Jose Clemente Orozco. He earned his Master of Art degree from Columbia University and also studied at the Leonardo da Vince Art School. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1935 at the A.C.A. Gallery in New York.

Dobkin was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1969 and elevated to full Academician in 1973. He authored Principles of Figure Drawing in 1948 and Alexander Dobkin’s Travel Sketchbook in 1966.

The work of Alexander Dobkin is represented in the collections of the Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Newark Museum, New Jersey; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Phoenix Fine Arts Museum, Arizona; the Hirshhorn Gallery, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

Alexander Dobkin died on March 21, 1975, in St. Martin, East Indies, while on a cruise.