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Alexander Liberman





Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman (born in Kiev September 4, 1912 - died in Miami November 19, 1999) was a Russian-American magazine editor, publisher, painter, photographer, and sculptor. He held senior artistic positions during his 32 years at Condé Nast Publications.

Biography


When his father took a post advising the Soviet government, the family moved to Moscow. Life there became difficult, and his father secured permission from Lenin and the Politburo to take the boy to London in 1921.

Young Liberman was educated in Russia England and France, and took up life as a White emigre in Paris.

He began his publishing career in Paris with the early pictorial magazine Vu, where he worked under Lucien Vogel and with photographers such as Brassai, André Kertész, and Robert Capa.

After emigrating to New York in 1941, he began working for Conde Nast Publications, rising to the position of Editorial Director, which he held from 1962-1994.

Only in the 1950s did Liberman take up painting and, later, metal sculpture. His highly recognizable sculptures are assembled from industrial objects (segments of steel I-beams, pipes, drums, etc.,) often painted in uniform bright colors. Prominent examples are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Laumeier Sculpture Park, Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, Tate Gallery, and the Guggenheim Museum.

He was briefly married (August 25, 1936) Hildegarde Sturm, a model and competitive skier. His second wife (since 1942), Tatiana Yacovleff du Plessix Liberman (1906-1991), had been a childhood playmate and baby sitter. In 1941, they escaped together from occupied France, via Lisbon, to New York. She had boperated a hat salon in Paris, then designed hats for Henri Bendel in New York. She continued in millinery at Saks Fifth Avenue until the mid-1950s, where she was billed as "Tatania du Plessix" or "Tatania of Saks". In 1992 he married Melinda Pechangco, a nurse who had cared for Tatiana during an earlier illness. His stepdaughter, Francine du Plessix Gray, is a noted author.

Career


*part-time design assistant to A. M. Cassandre for about three months, Paris, 1930
*Art Director, then Managing Editor, under Lucien Vogel, Vu magazine, Paris, 1933-36
*full-time painter since 1936
*Served in the French Army, 1940
*photographer since 1949
*sculptor since 1958
*Vogue magazine, New York. Condé Nast himself hired Liberman as an assistant to Vogue art director Mehemed Fehmy Agha, who had just fired him. In 1943 Liberman succeeded Agha as the magazine's art director.
**layout artist, 1941-43
**Vogue's Art Director, 1943
**Art Director, 1944-61. Vogue published Lee Miller's photographs of the Buchenwald gas chambers.
**Editorial Director, from 1962, Condé Nast Publications, United States and Europe
*numerous exhibitions of paintings and sculptures

Awards


*Gold Medal for Design, Exposition Internationale, Paris, 1937
*D.F.A.: Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 1980.

Publications


*''La Femme Francaise dans l'Art'', 1936. (in French)
* (Editor and designer) The Art and Technique of Color Photography: A Treasury of Color Photographs by the Staff Photographers of Vogue, House & Garden, Glamour, introduction by Aline B. Louchheim, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY), 1951.
* The Artist in His Studio, foreword by James Thrall Soby, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1960, revised edition, Random House (New York, NY), 1988.
* (Photographer) Greece, Gods, and Art, introduction by Robert Graves, commentaries by Iris C. Love, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1968.
* Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 (exhibition), Garamond/Pridemark Press (Baltimore, MD), 1970.
*Introduction to Vogue Book of Fashion Photography 1919-1979, by Polly Devlin, New York 1979.
* Marlene: An Intimate Photographic Memoir, Random House (New York, NY), 1992.
* (Photographer) Campidoglio: Michelangelo's Roman Capitol, essay by Joseph Brodsky, Random House (New York, NY), 1994.
* (And photographer) Then: Photographs, 1925-1995, preface by Calvin Tomkins, selected and designed by Charles Churchward, Random House (New York, NY), 1995.


Source: Wikipedia