Alexander Liberman

Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman (September 4, 1912 – 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.

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 (segments of steel I-beams, pipes, drums, and such), 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 65 feet (20 m) x 102 feet (31 m) x 100 feet (30 m) 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 (Kazanjian and Tomkins, 1993).

He was married briefly to Hildegarde Sturm (August 25, 1936), 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 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.

• part-time design assistant to A. M. Cassandre for approximately three months, Paris, 1930
• full-time painter since 1936
• Served in the French Army, 1940
• photographer since 1949
• sculptor since 1958
• Vogue magazine, Manhattan, Condé Nast 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 art director, 1943
  • Vogue art director, 1944–61, published Lee Miller's photographs of the Buchenwald gas chambers.
  • editorial director, from 1962, Condé Nast Publications, United States and Europe, deputy chairman (Editorial) 1994-99
• numerous exhibitions of paintings and sculptures

• Gold Medal for Design, Exposition Internationale, Paris, 1937.
• Doctor of Fine Arts: Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 1980.

• La Femme Française 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 & Schuster (New York), 1951
• The World in Vogue, Compiled by the Viking Press and Vogue ; Editors for Viking: Bryan Holme and Katharine Tweed ; Editors for Vogue: Jessica Daves and Alexander Liberman, New York : Viking Press, 1963
• The Artist in His Studio, foreword by James Thrall Soby, Viking Press (New York), 1960, revised edition, Random House (New York), 1988
• (photographer) Greece, Gods, and Art, introduction by Robert Graves, commentaries by Iris C. Love, Viking Press (New York), 1968
• Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970 (exhibition), Garamond/Pridemark Press (Baltimore, Maryland), 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), 1992
• (photographer) Campidoglio: Michelangelo's Roman Capitol, essay by Joseph Brodsky, Random House (New York), 1994
• (photographer) Then: Photographs, 1925–1995, preface by Calvin Tomkins, selected and designed by Charles Churchward, Random House (New York), 1995

• Ritual II (1966), Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Orbits (1967), Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Axeltree (1967), Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Temple II (1964-1969), The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, New York
• Contact II (1972), Portland, Oregon
• Gate of Hope (1972), University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Path (1973), Denison University, Granville, Ohio
• Argo (1974), Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Covenant (1975), University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Symbol (1978), Rockford, Illinois
• On High (1979), New Haven, Connecticut
• Stargazer (1983), San Diego, California
• Olympic Iliad (1984), Seattle, Washington
• Galaxy (1985), Leadership Square, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Trope I (1986), Norfolk, Virginia
• Abracadabra (1992), Hamilton, Ohio
• Archway (1997), Museum SAN, Wonju, South Korea
• The Way (1980), Laumeier Sculpture Park, St Louis, Missouri

Liberman's work is held in the following collections:

• Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Storm King Art Center
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
• Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park
• Tate Gallery
• Guggenheim Museum