Alexander Liberman

Biography

The sculpture “The Way” (1980) in Laumeier Sculpture Park near St. Louis is assembled from eighteen salvaged steel oil tanks. It is about twenty metres high, thirty-one long and thirty wide. Its author was, in those same years, editorial director of all the magazines of the publishing house Condé Nast.

He took up painting seriously only in the 1950s, and metal sculpture in 1958.

Alexander Semyonovich Liberman was born on 22 August (4 September) 1912 in Kiev, into a Jewish family. His father, Simkha Shayevich Liberman, was then a student at the Kiev Commercial Institute; his mother, Gitlya Meerovna, came from Kishinev and was a midwife. After the revolution his father became an adviser to the Soviet government, and the family moved to Moscow. Life there was hard, and in 1921 his father obtained permission from Lenin and the Politburo to take his son to London. Alexander was educated in England and France and grew up in Paris, among the White émigrés.

In 1930 he spent about three months assisting the poster artist A. M. Cassandre. In 1933–1936 he worked on one of the first French picture magazines, Vu in Paris, under Lucien Vogel, first as art director, then as managing editor, dealing with the photographers Brassaï, André Kertész and Robert Capa. In 1936 his book “La Femme française dans l’art” came out, and at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris he won a gold medal for design.

In 1941, together with Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix, whom he married the following year, he escaped from occupied France via Lisbon to New York. The same year Condé Nast took him on as assistant to Vogue’s art director, Mehemed Fehmy Agha, against Agha’s own wishes, and a year later Liberman took his place. He remained art director of Vogue until 1962; in those years the magazine published Lee Miller’s photographs from Buchenwald. In 1962 he was appointed editorial director of all Condé Nast publications in the United States and Europe. He held that post until 1994, and then, until 1999, was deputy chairman for editorial matters. In all, he worked at Vogue for fifty-eight years. Liberman’s stepdaughter, the writer Francine du Plessix Gray, wrote about him and her mother in the memoir “Them” (2005).

Before painting and sculpture, he was a photographer. From 1948 he spent his summers in Europe photographing artists of the older generation in their studios: Braque, Matisse, Utrillo, Chagall, Duchamp, Brâncuși, Picasso. In 1959 the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited these photographs, and in 1960 they came out as a book, “The Artist in His Studio”. Later he took the photographs for the books “Greece, Gods, and Art” (1968), with an introduction by Robert Graves, and “Campidoglio” (1994), on Michelangelo’s Roman Capitol, with an essay by Joseph Brodsky.

Liberman assembled his sculptures from industrial parts: segments of steel I-beams, pipes, drums, and often painted them all over in a single bright colour. In a 1986 interview he said that many works of art are like a scream and that he felt close to that scream. It seems to me that the single colour is there so that the viewer sees the form rather than a former tank or pipe. “Prometheus” (1964) stands at the University of Minnesota, “Orbits” and “Axeltree” (both 1967) in the Lynden Sculpture Garden near Milwaukee, “Argo” (1974) in Milwaukee itself, “Adonai” (1971) at Storm King, “Faith” (1984) in Jerusalem, “Olympic Iliad” (1984) in Seattle, and “Archway” (1997) in Wonju, South Korea. His work is also in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Tate and the Guggenheim Museum.

In 1980 the Rhode Island School of Design made him an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts. Liberman died on 19 November 1999 in Miami.