Building the Collective

Soviet Graphic Design, 1917-1937 Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection

The special exhibition Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design, 1917-1937, Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection will be on display at the Busch-Reisinger and Arthur M. Sackler Museums, Harvard University Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street and 485 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from January 18 through March 30, 1997. This traveling exhibition was organized by Leah Dickerman (Harvard-Radcliffe '86), assistant professor of art history, University of Delaware, for the Miriam and Ira Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York City. More than 100 posters and graphic work selected from the holdings of Merrill C. Berman '60, without question the preeminent private collection of graphic design in the United States, will be on display. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue edited by Dickerman. Building the Collective is organized at the Harvard University Art Museums by Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator, Busch-Reisinger Museum, and is made possible by the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

The Soviet regime was committed to rule in the name of the working class and embraced a vision of Communism as a collective technological society. In the sphere of art, these founding principles placed unprecedented emphasis on images of workers, industrialization, and technology. Spanning the period from the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 until the end of the Second Five Year Plan in 1937, Building the Collective examines, for the first time in an exhibition, the ideological and visual strategies of these representations in Soviet graphic design. It presents the broadest range of political posters to have been shown in this country. The exhibition includes the work of Russian artists well known in the West such as Gustav Klutsis, Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and the Stenberg brothers, as well as by lesser known but important artists such as Aleksandr Deineka, Viktor Deni, Nikolai Dolgorukov, Elizaveta Ignatovna, Nataliia Pinus, and Sergei Sen'kin.

Common assumptions about a monolithic Soviet poster style are challenged by the broad spectrum of graphic design featured in Building the Collective. Works range over a wide variety of styles: from early Bolshevik posters full of brawny worker-heroes and dark villains; to self-consciously vernacular posters produced by the Russian Telegraph Agency [ROSTA]; to the constructivist photomontage which reiterates formally the technological utopianism of the posters' message; to a later form of monumental montage that uses discrepancies of scale to articulate hierarchies.

The selection and juxtaposition of works in Building the Collective, the text panels, and the catalogue essay, all serve to explore the multiple and complex ways in which, working for different state and regional agencies and through shifting historical priorities, artists constructed the image of the proletariat, of technology, and of labor itself.

The Merrill C. Berman Collection
Merrill C. Berman's graphic design collection rivals the best-known museum collections in its quality, scope, and scholarly seriousness. In particular, the Soviet and German material from the 1920s and 1930s is unsurpassed. Exhibitions such as Great Utopia (1992) at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Into Life at the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington (1990); and the Twentieth Century Poster (1984) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis have drawn on the Berman Collection. Building the Collective provides a unique opportunity to introduce many of these images and artists to American audiences.

The Catalogue
The fully-illustrated catalogue Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design, 1917-1937, Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection contains two essays: Building the Collective by Leah Dickerman and Switched On: Notes on Radio, Automata, and the Bright Red Star by Maria Gough. The cost is $34.95 (paper). 128 pages , 8 1/4 x 10 3/4", 45 halftones, 133 color plates.

RELATED EVENTS

Film Series
This special series of silent film screenings is sponsored by the Harvard University Art Museums and the Harvard Film Archive. An introductory lecture will be given prior to the first screening. All events will be held at the Harvard Film Archive in the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street; free admission; registration is not required. For further information call (617) 495-4544.

Thursday, January 30
Lecture, 6:00 p.m.
Nightmare or Dream: The End of the Great Utopia
Roberta Reeder, art historian
The Russian Revolution of 1917 promised the Great Utopia, but when Stalin came to power it turned into a nightmare of collectivization, industrialization and, in the arts, Socialist Realism. Roberta Reeder will discuss the transition between posters and films made in the idealistic period of the 1920s and the later works produced in the service of the Stalinist State.

Film, 7:00 p.m.
Strike (1924) by Sergei Eisenstein

Film, 9:00 p.m.
The General Line/a.k.a. The Old and the New (1929) by Sergei Eisenstein

Friday, January 31
Film, 7:00 p.m.
Zvenigora (1928) by Alexander Dovzhenko with live piano accompaniment

Film, 9:00 p.m.
Earth (1930) by Alexander Dovzhenko

Saturday, February 1
Film, 6:00 p.m.
The Overcoat (1926) by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg

Film, 8:00 p.m.
The New Babylon (1929) by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg

Gallery Talks
Gallery Talks are free with the price of admission to the Art Museums.

Sunday, January 26
Busch-Reisinger, 2:00 p.m., with Roberta Reeder, art historian.

Saturday, February 8
Busch-Reisinger, 11:30 a.m., with Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator, Busch-Reisinger Museum.

Concert

Sunday, February 23
Fogg, 5:30 p.m.
Jeffrey Goldberg, pianist, will perform works by Scriabin, Shostakovitch, and Stravinsky.
Admission is $5; $4 students and senior citizens. Doors open one-half hour before concert begins. The exhibition galleries will be open one-half hour before and one hour after the concert.
For further information call (617) 495-4544.

Lectures

Wednesday, March 12 and Thursday, March 13
Two lectures will be given on each evening
Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
Free
Questions of photomontage and revolutionary and/or totalitarian culture in the first two decades of the Soviet Union will be addressed in paired lectures by: Leah Dickerman, curator of the exhibition and assistant professor of art history, University of Delaware; Hubertus Gassner, senior curator, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Boris Groys, professor of philosophy and aesthetics, Hochschule fuer Gestaltung, Karlsruhe; and Christina Kiaer, assistant professor of art history, Columbia University. For further information please call (617) 495-4544.