Alexander A. Yaron was the younger son of the renowned Russian architect, Alexander J. Yaron, who arrived in Shanghai in 1922 and enjoyed a successful career, employing his older son, John, in his architecture firm. Although Alexander, Jr., lacked a formal arts education, he made up for it by self-study and an apprenticeship with the leading artists from Shanghai’s Russian diaspora, such as Victor Podgoursky and Vasily Zasipkin. After graduating from the German School, Yaron started to work as an artist and designer in foreign-owned advertising firms and news agencies, such as Carl Crow Inc. and Millington Ltd. In September 1930, he joined the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury as an artistic director, and after two years formed his own advertising studio Movieart, which later merged with the Cinema Arts Co. That partnership, however, was doomed, because the owner of the company, Alexander Segel, was continuously embroiled in court battles.

Yaron was equally competent in all visual arts, and his realistic portraiture was in constant demand by high-end clients. In 1936, three large portraits of Chinese political leaders – Sun Yatsen, Lin Sen and Chiang Kai-Shek – decorated a large Shanghai stadium during a mass sports event. Yaron took prize-winning landscape photographs and painted some icons at St. Nicholas Church on Route Vallon, built by his father. He regularly created scenery for the productions of the Russian opera and ballet at the Lyceum Theatre. He also did interior design, such as the new décor for the nightclub DD’s, on Avenue Joffre, in 1940. Yaron was an active participant of various art societies, including Ponedelnik (“Monday”) and HLAM.

In 1936, Yaron began his collaboration with the publisher Ivan Kounin and designed an illustrated volume devoted to the visit of the renowned opera singer Fedor Chaliapine to Shanghai. They spent the next year working on a book dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the Republic of China. In October 1938, another collaborative volume came out – a 282-page illustrated album entitled Eighty-Five Years of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, which was praised as “a credit to its editor, artist and publishing house” by the China Weekly Review.

In 1938, Yaron and Kounin formed Adcraft Studios, which produced photographic reports of public and private events, graphic advertising, book illustration and design, and various promotional material. Among their products were the programmes, booklets and posters for the Russian Light Opera shows. Their publications were renowned for their creative design, high-quality binding and tasteful presentation. Adcraft Studios also published art-focused magazines, such as Highlights of Art and others.

The crowing achievement of Adcraft Studios was the publication of the Diamond Jubilee of the International Settlement of Shanghai (1940), which took two years to produce. The 342-page volume with 549 illustrations contained 138 artworks, mostly by Russian artists such as Mikhail Kichigin, Vera Kuznetzova and Victor Podgoursky. Alexander Yaron contributed the layout design, twelve artworks and several advertisement designs.

In June 1941, Yaron severed his relationship with Kounin and founded Yaron Studios. He worked as a producer of commercial art and advertising until his departure from China in 1949. Among his corporate clients there were the China National Aviation Company (CNAC), Pan-American Airways, Henningsen Produce Co. and Shanghai’s major newspapers. With the establishment of communist rule, Alexander Yaron, his wife Helena and their young children Camilla and Alexander escaped to the Philippines, where many stateless refugees went. The family settled in the USA, where Yaron continued a career as a commercial artist at the Yaron Atelier, passing it on to his wife and son.