Merrill C. Berman Collection

Over the past fifty years, Merrill C. Berman has built a collection of avant-garde art and graphic design that is comparable in scope and depth to the collections of institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The collection is strong in twentieth century European art of the interwar period (1918-1939)—Dada, Bauhaus, Futurism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Russian Constructivism—but it also includes work of adjacent periods and geographical regions as they relate to key collecting interests. The collection includes well-known artists such as John Heartfield, Gustav Klutsis, Valentina Kulagina, El Lissitzky, E. McKnight Kauffer, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Jan Tschichold, but also those who may be less familiar such as Carl Grossberg, Lou Loeber, Josef Peeters, Nikolai Sedel’nikov, and Elena Semenova. It represents a complex history of modernism in which avant-garde artists actively produced both fine and applied art—commercial and political—often in communication with each other. Merrill C. Berman has long supported scholarly inquiry and the realization of exhibitions and publications in the United States and abroad. This website provides an overview of the collection and its long-standing role as a resource. Only a small part of the holdings, however, are represented here. If you are interested in learning more about any aspect of the collection, please contact us by email