The "Special Collection" of the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU) was established in 1937, and it contains some of the best works of the Ukrainian avant-garde and monumental art. The collection is comprised mostly of paintings and graphics that were considered inappropriate and unacceptable by the regime. They were collected by the secret police over a two-year period from museum in Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv and Poltava and were slated to be destroyed. However, they were preserved secretly in the museum, remaining hidden from the public eye during the Soviet period. Many of the artists represented in the collection were either repressed or executed for “formalism” or “bourgeois nationalism,” and many of their names were undeservedly forgotten until the late 1980s.