Black Curve

Alexander Liberman

Beginning in Paris at the pioneering publication VU, and ending at the Condé Nast empire in New York, Alexander Liberman spent his career thoroughly modernizing magazines, while maintaining his own practice as a painter, sculptor, photographer, and filmmaker. At VU, as managing director of the art department, he worked with the most influential photographers of the 20th century, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, and André Kertész. In 1941, he moved to New York, where he rose rapidly up the ranks at Vogue, then Condé Nast, re-shaping the look and layout of every publication he touched with his avant-garde vision. He orchestrated, for example, the use of Jackson Pollock’s paintings in Cecil Beaton’s famous fashion shoot. Liberman was enamored of American industrialization and modernization. He celebrated this in his own work, in hard-edged geometric abstractions and monumental, fiery, welded steel sculptures.