Camilla Gray

[6] Gray first began to research modern Russian art in an organised way in 1957, travelling internationally to gather material from individuals and institutions.

[4] In 1961 she wrote the catalogue for the Arts Council-supported retrospective exhibition of Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova's paintings and designs for the theatre.

[1] Gray won backing for her research from a number of influential figures such as Herbert Read, Kenneth Clark, Isaiah Berlin, and Alfred H. Barr.

Barr was particularly encouraging and helpful; he had visited Russia in the 1920s and met some of the people Gray was writing about and in a letter of 1961 urged her to publish her work despite her misgivings about possible errors in the text, saying that the book would, nonetheless, be a sound foundation for future scholars.

In the introduction to the first edition, Gray commented on the difficulties she had encountered in compiling the work, needing to combine information from newspaper articles, unpublished memoirs, exhibition catalogues and the often contradictory recollections of living artists.

[7] It was criticised by some reviewers for the seemingly arbitrary cut-off of 1922, for a certain amount of generalisation and excessive detail in other parts, and has to some extent been superseded by later more nuanced works that make a greater distinction between the individual Constructivists.

[8] Gray's publishers asked her to write a book specifically about Constructivism and she won a Leverhulme Trust award to pay for the research but was unable to proceed as the British Council would not endorse the project because she had no university degree.