He was a grandson of the landscape painter Mikhail Yakovlev (1880 — 1941), one of the founders of Russian impressionism. After his family had moved to Moscow in 1944 he worked as a courier in the Iskusstvo publishing house and attended Vasily Sitnikov's art studio. From 1945 Vladimir Yakovlev was observed and periodically kept in lunatic asylums.

In Moscow he got acquainted with artists Mikhail Grobman and Anatoly Zverev, poet Gennady Aygi (whose poems Vladimir Yakovlev illustrated), composer and clavecinist Andrey Volkonsky (who arranged Yakovlev's exhibition in his apartment in 1959) and met the Czech avant-garde theorist Indrzhikh Halupetsky.

The year 1963 saw the first official exposition of Vladimir Yakovlev in the USSR — it was a one-day exhibition together with Eduard Steinberg in the Dostoyevsky Museum. M. The artist's works were presented abroad at the Russian Avant-garde in Today's Moscow exhibition in Gmurzhinsk Gallery (Cologne, 1970), and others.

Vladimir Yakovlev mostly painted with gouache on paper or hardboard and preferred reserved, cool shades. He went through the period of non-figurative painting, in particular, lyrical abstractionism in Paul Jackson Pollock's manner, and was under Picasso's influence. Yakovlev's mature art works were created in line with "new figuration" — the avant-garde trend that came back from abstraction to the subject perceived with new dramatic approach. His portraits, still lifes, and famous "flowers" impress with depth of lonely existence in the painting space, and hidden energy of resistance.

Recognition
In 1990 — 1991 his works were displayed at the exhibition Different Art. Moscow 1956 — 1976 organized by the State Tretyakov Gallery and the State Russian Museum. The year 1995 saw Vladimir Yakolev's personal exhibition in the State Tretyakov Gallery.

Vladimir Yakovlev's works are kept in lots of Russian ("Different Art" Museum (Moscow), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Moscow), the New Museum (St. Petersburg), and the Chuvash State Art Museum (Cheboksary)) and foreign museums, in private collections in Russia and abroad.