Alexander Liberman


Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman was a Russian-American magazine editor, publisher, painter, photographer, and sculptor. He held senior artistic positions during his 32 years at Condé Nast Publications.

Life and career

He was born into a Jewish family in Kiev. 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 his son to London in 1921.
Young Liberman was educated in Russia, England, and France, where he took up life as a "White Émigré" in Paris.
He began his publishing career in Paris in 1933–36 with the early pictorial magazine Vu, where he worked under Lucien Vogel as art director, then managing editor, working with photographers such as Brassaï, André Kertész, and Robert Capa.
After emigrating to New York in 1941, he began working for Condé Nast Publications, rising to the position of editorial director, which he held from 1962 to 1994.
Only in the 1950s did Liberman take up painting and, later, metal sculpture. His highly recognizable sculptures are assembled from industrial objects, often painted in uniform bright colors. In a 1986 interview concerning his formative years as a sculptor and his aesthetic, Liberman said, "I think many works of art are screams, and I identify with screams." His massive work "The Way", a x x structure, is made of eighteen salvaged steel oil tanks, and became a signature piece of Laumeier Sculpture Park, and a major landmark of St. Louis, Missouri.
Before finding success in painting and sculpture, Liberman was a photographer. Beginning in 1948, he spent his summers visiting and photographing a generation of modern European artists working in their studios including Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Maurice Utrillo, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, and Pablo Picasso. In 1959 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City exhibited Liberman's photographs of artists and their studios. A year later the images were collected in Liberman's first book, The Artist in his Studio published by Viking Press.
He was married briefly to Hildegarde Sturm, a model and competitive skier. His second wife, 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. She continued in millinery at Saks Fifth Avenue where she was billed as "Tatania du Plessix" or "Tatania of Saks", until the mid-1950s. In 1992, he married Melinda Pechangco, a nurse who had cared for Tatiana during an early illness. His stepdaughter, Francine du Plessix Gray, was a noted author.

Career

Liberman started his career as a part-time design assistant to graphic artist A. M. Cassandre in Paris for approximately three months in 1930. He started working as a full-time painter in 1936. Then, he served in the French army in the 1940s but was rejected due to ulcers. He began taking photographs in 1949 and sculpting in 1958. Liberman was employed at Vogue magazine from 1941 for 58 years. He was hired by Condé Nast as an assistant to Vogue art director Mehemed Fehmy Agha against Agha’s wishes and took over the position a year later. From 1941-1962, Liberman succeeded Agha as the magazine's art editor. As part of his work as Vogue art director from 1944–61, he published Lee Miller's photographs of the Buchenwald gas chambers. In 1962, he was promoted to editorial director of all Condé Nast publications, United States and Europe, deputy chairman 1994-99. Throughout his life, Liberman held numerous exhibitions of paintings and sculptures.

Awards

Liberman's work is held in the following collections: