GLEN HEAD, N.Y.- Esphyr Slobodkina, a prominent abstract artist better known for her children’s book "Caps for Sale," died on Sunday at her home in Glen Head, N.Y. She was 93. During the period of social and political turmoil that followed the Russian revolution, Esphyr Slobodkina fled with her family to Vladivostok, and then to Herbin, Manchuria. In 1928, she immigrated to New York and the following year entered the National Academy of Design. Although unenthusiastic about the curriculum, Slobodkina’s visa required that she attend school, and she remained at the Academy until 1933. It was during that time that she met abstract artist Ilya Bolotowsky (1897 Russia-1981 USA), whom she married in 1933. Slobodkina still considered herself very much a student when she married Bolotowsky, but, by signing her name to several of his early paintings, he wrangled invitations for both of them to go to Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Still wavering between the Impressionist theories she had learned earlier, and Bolotowsky’s modernist ideas (he had not yet ventured into pure abstraction), she painted expressionist still-life and interior scenes during the several months they spent in Saratoga Springs. Her first Cubist-inspired painting was created in 1934. Without rejecting more expressionist landscape and still-life paintings, she began in the winter of 1936-37 to concentrate seriously on abstraction. Financial pressures in the 1930s made it difficult for Slobodkina to concentrate on painting. Her parents had come to New York, but the family’s economic situation was precarious. During the early 1930s she and her mother opened a dressmaking business, designing and creating fine clothing and millinery. Among other short-lived jobs, Slobodkina worked for several textile printing firms, each of which folded.

Slobodkina joined the American Abstract Artists early in the organization’s history in 1936. Once a member, she served the organization in various capacities for several decades. During the early 1940s, with Alice Trumbull Mason, she helped organize an ambitious program of cultural evenings that combined lectures and parties. In her role as hospitality chairman, she introduced socially prominent New Yorkers to the organization.

A change in the direction of her career came in 1937, when Slobodkina first met Margaret Wise Brown, a noted author of children’s books. Hoping to find illustration work, she wrote and illustrated a children’s story to present as an introductory “portfolio.” Brown was charmed by their directness and simplicity and asked Slobodkina to illustrate Brown’s book The Little Fireman, published the following year. This was the first of many children’s tales that Slobodkina was to illustrate, and soon she began writing her own stories as well. Caps for Sale, her best-known book, has become a classic. By the mid 1940s, Slobodkina had matured as an artist, and she was invited to exhibit in the influential "Eight By Eight" exhibition of American abstract art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1945. In recognition of her own accomplishment and creative potential Slobodkina was invited back to Yaddo in 1957, and the following year she went twice to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Her children books continue to delight children worldwide.

The original "Caps for Sale", first published in 1938, has sold more than two million copies since it was first published, according to Ms. Slobodkina’s publisher, HarperCollins. Her work is represented in numerous collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.