Deborah Rothschild
Darra Goldstein
Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1998, English
Nonfiction, Graphic Design
9 x 11 inches, paperback, 222 pages, 100 color and 100 black-and-white plates
ISBN: 9780913697238

From the Publisher. Drawing from Merrill C. Berman’s spectacular private collection of twentieth-century posters, ads, photomontages, and graphic ephemera, this book showcases over two hundred examples of progressive graphic design from the 1920s and 30s. European, Soviet, and American 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, most never before shown or reproduced in the United States, include works by well-known artists (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Cassandre, Man Ray, and others) and by lesser known masters. The book begins by detailing Berman’s pivotal role in shaping the history of graphic design as he amassed his collection. The authors then investigate the filtering of avant-garde design into mass produced posters and advertisements, the evolution of design production techniques in the Machine Age, and the avant-garde’s promotion of itself. (Out of print; available from Modernism 101).

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