Scope and Contents This exhibition catalogue of selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection is organized into four sections: Design and the Avant-Garde; Design and Commerce; Design and Social Change; Design and Politics. In addition to Yale, the catalogue was published by Willliams College of Art and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Berman's collection is the premier graphic design collection of the 20th century works in the United States. In her introductory essay, "Writing a History," Maud Lavin points out that Berman collected with aggression and dedication for twenty years starting in 1975, shaping the history of graphic design during the period when the scholarly field of design history was emerging. Berman viewed graphic design works as objects of art, politics and cultural history. His collection "covers innovative design used in the politics of everyday life, in persuading consumers, in propagating for political causes, in redesigning ever-industrializing cultures, in papering...

Scope and Contents

Deborah Rothschild, editor and curator, contributes an introductory essay for the catalogue and an acknowledgement in which she writes that "William Jay Smith knew the Murphys firsthand, and they also singledout his talent, prophesizing a distinguished career in arts and letters." Smith writes an essay titled "Gerald Murphy - cubist Painter, Concrete Poet" in which he describes his typewriter poems and how Gerald Murphy purchased copies of "Typewriter Birds" in excahnge for a Mark Cross attache case. In this essay, Smith also describes the genre of typewriter poetry and how he started to create them and how he felt that he "had instinctively reached back and cut through to something primitive and unspoiled. The fact that my triumph had begun as a humorous gesture made it no less serious. I had touched something, I felt, at the depth of the psyche, at that still center where creation makes its mysterious way." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.