Merrill at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 8, 2021 (photo: Jolie Simpson)

About Us

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 fraught history of the twentieth century, marked by the struggle betweeen autocracy and democracy, has long guided Berman’s acquisition interests (see statement here). 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, Hannah Höch, El Lissitzky, E. McKnight Kauffer, Paul Nash, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Jan Tschichold, but also those who may be less familiar such as Carl Grossberg, Lou Loeber, Josef Peeters, Nikolai Sedelnikov, and Elena Semenova. An overview of the collection can be viewed here. 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 ever-expanding website, offering monographic and thematic explorations, provides access to the collection to scholars and the public alike in lieu of a physical exhibition site. If you are interested in learning more about any aspect of the collection, please direct your email to: mcbcollect@gmail.com.

Merrill C. Berman Collection
Rye, New York

Phone:
+1 (914) 967-8200

Fax: 
+1 (914) 967-8252

Email:
mcbcollect@gmail.com

Merrill with a visiting class from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, 2024 (photo: Kat Flores)

Merrill C. Berman, Chief Curator and Chief Executive Officer
Lisa Berman, Chief Operating Officer
Adrian Sudhalter, Ph.D., Research Curator
Alla Rosenfeld, Ph.D., Research Consultant for Russian and Eastern European Collection 
Jolie Simpson, Designer, Photographer, and Senior Collections Manager

We welcome inquiries regarding institutional loans or collaborations. Please contact us via email.