February 6-March 30, Wed.-Sat. 1-5 P.M. Free admission.

Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University, Broadway and 116th Street. Information: (212) 854-7288

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, an exhibition on view February 6-March 30 at Columbia University, 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. It is believed to be the most comprehensive exhibition of Soviet propaganda art and other graphic work ever shown in this country.

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. It can be seen in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery on Columbia's Morningside Heights campus at Broadway and 116th Street Wednesday to Saturday from 1 to 5 P.M.; admission is free. (Information: 212/854-7288.)

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. The curator is Leah Dickerman, the David E. Finley Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and a doctoral candidate in Columbia's Department of Art History and Archaeology.

"Building the Collective examines how Soviet propaganda art developed the notion of the collective as a political ideal," said Ms. Dickerman 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, Natal'ia 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 hierarchies. 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. In addition, a scholarly symposium, free and open to the public, will be held on March 22 from 3 to 6 P.M. in Schermerhorn Hall at Columbia to develop further the theoretical and historical issues examined in the exhibition. Participants will be, as well as Ms. Dickerman and Ms. Gough, Benjamin Buchloh of Barnard College and Columbia, Christina Kiaer of the University of California at Berkeley, and Juliet Koss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Berman's graphic design collection rivals the best-known museum holdings in its quality, scope and scholarly seriousness. Exhibitions such as The Great Utopia (1992) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Art Into Life (1990) at the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington and Twentieth Century Poster (1984) at the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis have all drawn extensively from the Berman Collection.

Ms. Dickerman, who was the curatorial consultant for the exhibition of ROSTA posters at the Sander Gallery in New York City last year, is writing her dissertation on the photomontage and photographic work of Aleksandr Rodchenko.

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

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