Death record and obituary for Camilla Gray from Lakeland, Florida. Camilla Gray is the author of The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922 (3.97 avg rating, 94 ratings, 4 reviews, published 1971).

Contents • • • • • • Early life [ ] Camilla Gray was born in 1936, the daughter of, keeper of Oriental art at the British Museum, and the calligraphy expert. She had a sister Cecilia and a brother Edmund. The family lived at the museum. She was the granddaughter of the poet.

She was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Hammersmith, London, and remained a committed Catholic throughout her life. According to 's father, Basil Gray did not approve of higher education for girls and so she did not attend university, instead, being very determined, she had simply gone to live in Cambridge for several years and attended the lectures at the university there and got to know the professors. She was already studying Russian modernism. She first visited Russia as a ballet student in 1955 and also trained as a Russian interpreter. Russian art [ ] Gray first began to research modern Russian art in 1957, travelling internationally to gather material from individuals and institutions. She first interviewed the surviving Russian artists of the modern period in Paris and then spent most of 1958 researching at the in New York and at Yale University. She supported herself by working at the New York Public Library.

Her writing began to be published, starting with an article on that appeared in The Times in 1958 and another on appearing in Typographica in 1959. She found that nobody she discussed Lissitsky with had heard of him. Also in 1959 she wrote the catalogue for the exhibition held at the in London. In 1960 she visited Russia again for six weeks, researching in archives and interviewing surviving artists just in time to capture their memories. In 1961 she wrote the catalogue for the retrospective exhibition of and 's paintings and designs for the theatre. Gray won backing for her research from a number of influential figures such as,,, and.

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. The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922 was published in a large format by Thames & Hudson in 1962 and broke new ground in explaining Russian avante-garde art outside Russia. Mestrenova Serial Mackerel.

It was dedicated to Gray's mother 'to whom this book owes its inspiration and realization'. 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.

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 superceded by more nuanced later works that make a greater distinction between the individual Constructivists, however, there was also general praise for the achievement of what was clearly a very difficult task that nobody else had been able to tackle in an area that was previously largely unknown to Western scholars. Gray's publishers asked her to write another book specifically about and she won a Leverhulme scholarship 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. In 1971, The Great Experiment was retitled The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922 and published in Thames & Hudson's small format series without the artist's statements from the original. A revised and expanded edition by Marian Burleigh-Motley was published in the same series in 1986. Gray proposed an exhibition of Soviet revolutionary art in Britain and due to her efforts it was realised in 1971 as Art in Revolution: Soviet Art and Design since 1917 which ran at the from 26 February to 18 April 1971 with the support of the Arts Council. Gray wrote the introduction to the catalogue by which time she was describing herself as Camilla Gray-Prokofieva. Personal life [ ] In November 1969, Gray married, son of the composer, whom she had met in Russia in 1960.