BUILDING THE COLLECTIVE
SOVIET GRAPHIC DESIGN 1917 - 1937
Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection
Leah Dickerman [Editor]
Leah Dickerman [Editor]: BUILDING THE COLLECTIVE -- SOVIET GRAPHIC DESIGN 1917 -1937 [Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection]. New York: Princeton Architectural Press in conjunction with the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, 1996. First edition. Quarto. Glossy photo illustrated wrappers. 186 pp. 109 color plates. Interior unmarked and very clean. Wrappers lightly scratched, but a nearly fine copy. Uncommon.
8.25 x 10.75 softcover book with 186 pages and 109 color plates selected from Merrill C. Berman’s spectacular private collection of twentieth-century Soviet posters, ads, photomontages, and graphic ephemera. Published in association with an exhibition held at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University. Includes a useful bibliography. Features 100 posters and other graphic works created from designs of eminent Russian artists. Also includes artist biographies, notes on the collection, and an essay on how the collection has been built. This is an essential volume for any designer or historian of the Constructivist Movement -- my highest recommendation.
"Covering the first decades of the Soviet Union, from the Civil War to the end of Stalin's Second Five-Year Plan in the 1930s, the graphic works in Building the Collective provide a remarkable overview of design during one of this century's most politically turbulent and artistically active periods. These designs, from the collection of Merrill C. Berman, challenge assumptions of a monolithic Soviet poster style, conveying the impressive range of graphic design as it responded to a rapidly evolving political situation.”
This book showcases over one hundred examples of progressive graphic design from the 1917 to 1937. These Soviet avant-garde designers and artists of the time, using new technologies of mass production and mass distribution, marketed everything from salad oil and cigarettes to communism, utopian socialism, and the avant-garde itself. These selections from the Berman Collection, many never before shown or reproduced in the United States, include works by well-known artists (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Klutsis, the Stenbergs and others) and by lesser known masters.
- Foreword by Jonathan Crary
- Building the Collective by Leah Dickerman
- Switched On by Maria Gough
- Civil War (1918 - 1921)
- NEP (1921 - 1927)
- Five Year Plans (1928 - 1937)
- the fate of the WPA posters
- About the Collection
- artists biographies
- Selct Bibliography
This book contains work by Alexandre Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Gan, Stepanova, the Stenberg Brothers, Kandinsky, Gustav Klutsis, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Salomon Telingater, Liobov Popova, Aleksei Gan, Naum Gabo, Mosei Ginzburg, Vladimir Tatlin, Aleksandr Vesnin, and many others.
During the years 1915-32, Moscow and Petrograd (from 1924, Leningrad) witnessed revolutions in art and politics that changed the course of Modernist art and modern history. Though the great revolution in art — the radical formal innovations constituted by Vladimir Tatlin's "material assemblages" and Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism — in fact preceded the political revolution by several years, the full weight of the new expressive possibilities was felt only after, and to a large extent because of, the social upheavals of February and October 191J. As avant-garde artists, armed with new insights into form and materials , sought to realize the Utopian aims of the Bolshevik Revolution, art and life seemed to merge.
Selected from the superb collection of Merrill Berman, this book features a richly diverse group of artists and styles linked by their beliefs in a Statist Utopia. As with Berman’s entire collection, this catalog demonstrated a “personalized” cut through 20th Century visual culture “authored” by a collector with an extremely keen and knowledgeable eye. Rather than acquiring only important names (although the collection has more than its share of these, as well), Berman has considered the “aesthetic” aspect of each work and its historical context in deciding whether to add it to his collection. Berman is best known as a collector of graphic design—both the final printed works and the original art works used in their creation—and his collection consists of well in excess of 20,000 pieces.