This is the first book about the work of Rostislav Barto. This artist’s name was already well-known among art historians during the twenties: Barto is the most outstanding of Aleksandr Shevchenko’s students; he was a participant in the artists’ association Tsekh zhivopistsev (Painters’ Workshop) and likely the most masterful practitioner of monotyping in the 20^th century. At the end of the twenties and beginning of the thirties his works found interested and comprehending audiences among viewers and collectors when they were displayed at exhibitions organized by Vsekokhudozhnik (the All-Russian Union of Cooperative Partnerships of Graphic Arts Workers) in Amsterdam, Stockholm, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Paris, Venice, Copenhagen and Tokyo; these works often remained in those cities as parts of private and modern art collections. Unfortunately, the attention of critiques was sometimes merely a sign that an artist was destined to live in troubled times. In Osip Beskin’s 1933 book Formalizm v zhivopisi (Formalism in Painting), which became the ideological platform the struggle against “leftist” art, Barto was described as follows: “Barto demonstrates with his work that he lives not only at a distance, but as if outside of our reality. He has created his own world; or, more accurately, has dragged another world to us and, through this stark world of other things and of people transformed into things, wishes to refract and break our reality as well.”