The Library's holdings of Slavic and East European avant-garde publications are vast. For example, the Library holds more than 600 Czech avant-garde books (all in call no..Slav. Reserve 98-407). Spencer Collection holds several Czech (call no. Spencer Coll. Czech) as well as Russian (call no. Spencer Coll. Russ.) avant-garde books. Included in the holdings are works by El Lissitzky, Laszla Moholy-Nagy, Karel Teige, Niklavs Strunke, Victor Brauner, and others. The following checklists help locate Slavic and East European avant-garde publications at the NYPL.
To highlight some of the avant-garde holdings, the Library presented an exhibition Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935, which took place from October 5, 2007, through January 27, 2008. Works exhibited were created by Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian artists and authors. They included monographs, serials, and posters. The exhibit was curated by Steven Mansbach and Wojciech Jan Siemaszkiewicz who published a companion volume, Graphic Modernism from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935, which includes an overview of the progressive East European graphic artists and writers. The volume also includes an essay by Edward Kasinec and Robert R. Davis Jr. on the growth and development of the Library's collections in this field, as well as a checklist of the exhibition. In conjunction with the exhibition, the recorded Graphic Modernism Lecture Series introduced and explained the complex historical and political events and artistic movements of the first four decades of the 20th century in Eastern Europe.
See also digitized images of Slavic and East European avant-garde from the collections of the NYPL.
For more information on the NYPL's Slavic and East European avant-garde materials see the following works