Alexander Liberman was a Russian-American artist. Also, he was a sculptor, painter, photographer, magazine editor, and publisher.
Background
Alexander Liberman was born on September 4, 1912, in Kyiv, Ukraine, into the family of Simon and Henriette (Pascar) Liberman. The first nine years of his life, he lived in Kyiv with his family where the father was in the lumber business and his mother was devoted to the theatre. The Liberman's left Russia in 1921. He came to the United States in 1941 and naturalized in 1946.
Education
Alexander studied in England and France, first in London and then in Paris with Andre Lhote from 1929 to 1931. He studied philosophy and mathematics at the Sorbonne and architecture at Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Alexander Liberman became an academic and post-Impressionist painter in Europe before moving to the United States in 1941. From that time, he painted and sculpted in abstract styles, often using the circle which he asserted was the ideal shape. In his sculpture, he was revolutionary because of his use of industrial materials, factory building methods, and large-scale size.
In the 1930s, Liberman designed stage sets and worked briefly with a landscape architect. He earned money by working as an assistant to the poster designer Cassandre and did editorial and technical work for the magazine "Vu", one of the earliest illustrated periodicals and the first magazine to include photographs. Eventually, he became managing director but left the business in 1936 to focus on painting, writing, and filmmaking.
In 1940, he escaped with his family to an unoccupied zone in France, and via Spain, the family arrived in New York in 1941. Again, he took employment in the publishing business, this time at "Vogue" magazine. Twenty years later, he became Editorial Director of all the Conde Nast Publications, and he held this job until 1994 when he retired.
He was responsible for much of the leading-edge aspects of the magazine by commissioning work by avant-garde artists such as Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Marc Chagall, and Marcel Duchamp. He had the distinction of being the only publisher allowed to print images of the Matisse chapel in Vence, France, and he used drip paintings by Jackson Pollock as backdrops for fashion shoots.
By the mid-1950s, Liberman had also progressed with his own creative efforts as a painter and photographer and was exhibiting in galleries and museums in New York City. In 1959, he began welding steel and started making sculpture on a large scale that required industrial machinery and eventually a large staff of assistants to meet the increasing demand for his work. It was said of him, that he emulated the industrialization that he found so impressive in America when he emigrated in 1941.
Alexander Liberman gained prestigious public commissions beginning in 1963 when architect Philip Johnson hired him to do work for the 1963 Worlds Fair in New York City. One of his first public commissions was from the architect Philip Johnson for a pavilion at the 1963 World's Fair. Liberman died in November 1999 at the age of 87.
His sculptures and paintings are currently in many collections including the Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In addition, the Storm King Art Center has three monumental Liberman sculptures in its collection.
Liberman established himself as the magazine world’s supreme arbiter of taste and style. His modern, realistic, ever-changing approach to fashion photography and magazine design redefined American standards of beauty.
Quotations:
"I think many works of art are screams, and I identify with screams."
“Today everybody wants titles. It’s like attaching a wooden handle to something that hopefully cannot be pinned down.”
"Art is sacred. Good art should be. And I have always believed and attempted to fulfil that dream. It’s very hard, very difficult – maybe one is distracted, and then it’s hard having a job, having to stop painting, to drop everything even in the middle of a work to go to where you earn your living. I think the term ‘art director’ is the greatest misnomer that ever existed. There’s no art in magazines unless you are reproducing works of art. Otherwise, to consider any spread or cover as art… we don’t know what we are talking about. It’s as bad as saying that photography is art."
Interests
American industrialization and modernization
Artists
Cocteau and Léger
Connections
Alexander Liberman was married briefly to Hildegarde Sturm, a model and competitive skier. His second wife since 1942, Tatiana Yacovleff du Plessix Liberman, had been a childhood playmate and baby sitter. In 1941, they escaped together from occupied France, via Lisbon, to New York. She had operated a hat salon in Paris, then designed hats for Henri Bendel in Manhattan. In 1992, he married Melinda Pechangco, a nurse who had cared for Tatiana during an early illness. His stepdaughter, Francine du Plessix Gray, is a noted author.