The twenty-one Russian avant-garde books featured in this digital library collection belong to the Getty Research Institute's extensive and unique holdings on Russian modernism.

The GRI became a leading repository in this field with the acquisition in 1988 of a collection of hundreds of Russian modernist books and periodicals from the Parisian collector Marc-Martin Malburet. Since that time, significant acquisitions have been made both in Russian and Soviet books and in archival collections. In addition to the Kandinsky Papers, acquired in 1985, the GRI owns a major archive containing El Lissitzky's letters to his wife Sophie Küppers and photographs of his exhibition designs; the VKhUTEMAS archive of faculty and student work; and a collection of Soviet photographs from 1918.

The twenty-one Russian avant-garde books on this site were first selected for digitization as part of a workshop, "Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde," held in April 2007. Four of the digitized books—A Game in Hell: A Poem, Explodity (first edition), Transrational Boog, and Pomade—will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1917 (see Related Exhibition above).

Nancy Perloff, Getty Research Institute, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Collections