Slavic and East European Visual Materials: Avant-garde

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.

• Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde and constructivist books and serials in the New York Public Library: a first census & listing of artists represented [1998] / compiled by Robert H. Davis, Jr. and Margaret Sandler; with an introduction by Gail Harrison Roman, Robert H. Davis, Jr.
• Checklist of Russian, Ukrainian & Belarusian Avant-Garde & Modernist Books, Serials & Works on Paper at The New York Public Library & Columbia University Libraries [2015] / Compiled by Robert H. Davis Jr., Columbia University & Cornell University Megan Duncan-Smith, Harvard University With an Introduction by Steven Mansbach, University of Maryland.
• Eastern European Modernism: Works on Paper at the Columbia University Libraries and The Cornell University Library / Compiled by Robert H. Davis with a Foreword by Steven Mansbach, with an Introduction by Irina Denischenko [This checklist lists holdings at other libraries. See the Index under New York Public Library or simply search the text for 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 

• Davis, Robert H., “Collecting Modernist Works on Paper at Columbia, Cornell, and the New York Public Library: Past and Present,” Slavic & East European Information Resources 18:3-4 (2017): 203-222.
• ----------. and Edward Kasinec. "From Shelf to Spotlight: Rediscovering Modernist Books from Eastern Europe at The New York Public Library", in: S.A. Mansbach with Wojciech Jan Siemaszkiewicz, Graphic Modernism: from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935 (New York, N.Y.: The New York Public Library, 2007) and in Slavic & East European Information Resources 9:4 (2008): 355-373.
• Mansbach, S.A. with Wojciech Jan Siemaszkiewicz, Graphic Modernism: from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935 (New York, N.Y.: The New York Public Library, 2007).