Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design, 1917–1937

In the formative first decades of the Soviet Union, the drive to create a new, technologically advanced, collective society produced a propaganda effort of unprecedented magnitude. Posters and other graphic works became a principal tool in the campaign to reach the masses and transform the proletariat. In Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design, 1917-1937, selections from the Collection of Merrill C. Berman create an exhibition of more than one hundred works spanning the first two decades of the Soviet Union provide an overview of design during one of this century's most politically turbulent and artistically active periods.

Building the Collective challenges the assumption that Soviet poster style was monolithic by displaying an impressive range of graphic design as it responded to a rapidly evolving political situation. Focusing on images of labor, industrialization and technology, the exhibition demonstrates how the ideological imperative of imagining a new collective society existed in a contradictory relationship with artists' efforts to redefine their role in post-revolutionary Russia.

Drawn from the holdings of Mr. Berman, one of the preeminent private collectors of graphic design in the United States, the exhibition includes many works never before seen outside the former Soviet Union and spans the period from the Bolshevik seizure of power to the end of the Second Five Year Plan. "Building the Collective examines how Soviet propaganda art developed the notion of the collective as a political ideal," said Leah Dickerman, exhibition curator, in discussing the project. "I think it will challenge commonly held assumptions about the uniformity of a Soviet poster style. Indeed, the exhibition will reveal the great diversity of stylistic idioms, a variety that indicates the intense debate among artists about the nature and goals of revolutionary art."

Russian artists who are well known in the West are included in the exhibition, among them Gustav Klutsis, Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and the Stenberg brothers. Lesser known but important figures whose works will be on view are Aleksandr Deineka, Viktor Deni, Nikolai Dolgorukov, Elena Semenova, Natalia Pinus and Sergei Sen'kin. Posters by artists who remain obscure or anonymous and those that were produced collaboratively or by collective brigades add to the broad spectrum of design.

Until the pronouncement of an official Socialist Realist style in 1934, there was intense debate among artists about the nature and goals of revolutionary art.

Posters ranged over a wide variety of styles: early Bolshevik posters full of brawny worker-heroes and dark villains; self-consciously vernacular works produced by the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA); Constructivist photomontages that reiterate formally the technological utopianism of the message; and later forms of monumental montage that use discrepancies of scale to articulate social farchies. Even after 1934 greater diversity existed in "low" genre posters and other graphic design than in the "high" genre painting and sculpture. The exhibition will explore the complex way in which artists constructed images of the proletariat, technology and labor while working for different state and regional agencies and through shifting historical priorities. The installation, in which posters and design objects will be mounted several levels high, will emphasize the works' original function as public placards.

Building the Collective will be accompanied by a catalogue of the same title, with essays by Ms. Dickerman and fellow art historian Maria Gough of Harvard University. Fully illustrated in color, the catalogue will be published and distributed by Princeton Architectural Press.

Gifts from two anonyous donors helped fund the exhibition and symposium.