After the death of Stalin, a small group of art enthusiasts in the Soviet Union started to collect modernist artworks that were considered formalist or anti-revolutionary, and were therefore ignored by official art institutions.
By doing so, these collectors played a pivotal role in the preservation of a crucial and now globally celebrated period of Russian cultural history.

The Paleev collection is the last of these private art collections to remain intact and in the hands of the family. It includes extremely important artworks by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Boris Grigoriev, Robert Falk, Nathan Altman and Vladimir Lebedev, among many others.

This book is the first publication dedicated exclusively to the Paleev collection. It places the collection in its historical context and catalogues its most important artworks.