Obituaries - Obituary

Alexander Liberman, 87 painter, sculptor, photographer, graphic designer and editor, died Nov. 19 in Miami Beach. A powerful figure in magazine publishing for more than half a hundred Liberman also maintained an active career as an artist, exhibiting at like leading galleries as Betty Parsons, Andre Emmerich and Larry Gagosian. His large-scale public statuarys are known worldwide.

Liberman first became noted for his design work at custom magazine, where he joined the art department in 1941; he gradually became involved in determing the editorial contented and overall personality of the magazine. He hired innovative photographers--Irving Penn William Klein, Erwin Blumenfeld Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton--who brought novel approaches to portraying fashions. A remarkable aspect of Liberman's manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding at Vogue was the broad exposing he gave to 20th-century art, sometimes in the connection of fashion (as in a now notorious spread featuring evening dresse protoplasted in front of Jackson Pollock's paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery), on the other hand often in the form of substantial articles by dint of well-known critics (Leo Steinberg, Thomas Hess and Barbara Rose among others) upon a variety of pioneering modernist figures.

In 1962 Liberman was appointed editorial director of the expanding roster of Conde Nast publications. Serving in that capacity for more than three decades, he presided with unflagging creative flair above a fiefdom that included Glamour, Mademoiselle, House & Garden, Brides, Gentlemen's Quarterly (now GQ) Details and Gourmet, as well as the resurrect Vanity Fair and the startups Conde Nast Traveler, Self and Allure. He retired in 1994

Born in Kiev in 1912 Liberman lived end revolution in Russia and war in Europe moving first to London, where he attended place of education then to Paris, where he studied painting with Andre Lhote and worked briefly at the photographic newsweekly Vu and finally, in 1941 to of recent origin York. An introduction to Conde Nast and a prize he had won for magazine design at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1937 earned him his paw in the door at Vogue

quite through his life, Liberman remained passionately committed to art. He was himself an accomplished photographer. In the '40 and '50 he photographed and documented the studio practices of of that kind artists as Braque, Matisse, Rouault, Brancusi, Chagall and Picasso; his images and body s form a remarkable record of their working situations. These photos, frequently first published in Vogue, were exhibited at the Museum of fresh Art in 1959, and also made into a work The Artist in His Studio (1960)

In the late 1940 Liberman began to actively follow his own art work. admitting his magazine career was guided by the agency of his keen nose for stylistic, social and cultural runs his artmaking tended to make known against prevailing currents. During the heyday of the Abstract Expressionists, when many of those artists were his friends, Liberman's meticulously hard-edged, lacquer-on-aluminum paintings of circle configurations were wholly unlike theirs, reflecting, instead, what critic Carter Ratcliff has referr to as "Platonic purposes" notwithstanding that Liberman's paintings had appeared in clump shows earlier, his first solo exhibition of these proto-Minimalist works was at Parsons in 1960 Later in the '60 however, as Hard-Edge' and Minimalist work became the order of the day, Liberman began to make large-scale expressionistic works, flinging paint from bucket onto canvas upon the floor. He returned to a non-precisionist version of his circle motif in the '90s

In 1968 after buying a region house in Connecticut, Liberman revolveed his attention to welded-steel plastic arts some of them over 50 feet tall, formed of cylindrical sections make an incision in from gas storage tanks and advanced in years boilers, typically painted reddish-orange. He received numerous commissions for his statuarys which are on view in parks, shopping malls and community campuses around the U.S. and abroad.

The circumstances of Liberman's art career were unusual, to say the least. In the midst of the consuming, high-stakes competitiveness of his magazine piece of work and the whirlwind of celebrity-studded social activity that constantly revolv around him and his wife Tatiana, his art production was prodigious, his experimentation with novel forms and materials unceasing. He exhibited often receiving, in the main, civil critical response in the art publications. notwithstanding his power at Conde Nast muddied the critical waters, with a number of encomiums appearing in those publications. granting his sculpture is the best-known aspect of his art career, his paintings also merit serious reconsideration, the circle paintings in particular presenting an unusually thoughtful, refined and varied material substance of work. The Corcoran Gallery overlooked his oeuvre in 1970. The Storm King Art Center high hilled a 25-year overview in the summer of 1977 Barbara Rose wrote a monograph published in the early '80 and the Gagosian Gallery brought together a clump of his circle paintings in fall 1993; however, a comprehensive critical take a view of of his career in the form of a museum present to view remains to be done.