Her work on the Peredvizhniki, first published in 1977, was part of a re-evaluation of their aims in breaking away from the Russian academy.
As of 2017, she remained an adjunct associate professor of art history and archaeology in the Harriman Institute of Columbia University.
In the foreword to the 1989 Columbia University Press reprint of the book, she commented that in writing it she had expected to find that the Peredvizhniki were all devoted followers of Nikolay Chernyshevsky and the other revolutionary democrats as stated in Soviet textbooks from 1932.
In her foreword to the reprint (written in September 1988) she noted that the courtesy copies of her 1977 book that she had sent to Soviet museums and libraries at the time had not been available to the general reader there but she hoped that in the period of glasnost that the reprinting of her book would be propitious and be part of the general reassessment and rectification of history in the USSR.
[2] In the book she explains how their motives were more liberal than revolutionary and related as much to their wish for personal autonomy as to their wish for political reform.