DEATH OF A VISIONARY
Byline: Mort Sheinman / With contributions from Miles Socha
NEW YORK — Alexander Liberman, a protean artist whose aesthetic vision helped shape Vogue and other Conde Nast publications for more than 50 years, died Friday in a Miami hospital after a short illness. He was 87 years old.
He had survived two heart attacks in 1991 and a massive heart attack in 1992, but after a triple bypass operation on Nov. 4, 1992 at the age of 80, he enjoyed a recovery so remarkable that he spent the next year actively involved with his work at Conde Nast.
Ironically, Liberman died 24 hours after the death of Horst P. Horst, one of the photographers whose work often appeared in Vogue during Liberman’s long career there. Horst died in Florida on Thursday at the age of 93.
Despite his ailments, Liberman remained a prolific worker almost until the end. His most recent book project was “Prayers in Stone,” a collection of his photographs of monuments and architectural sites. It was published in 1997. In this decade alone, he turned out three other books: “Marlene,” a collection of 92 of his photographs of Marlene Dietrich, who was a friend for more than half a century (1992); “Campidoglio,” a collection of his photographs of Michelangelo’s piazza at the summit of the Capitoline hill in Rome (1994), and “Then: Photographs 1925-1995.” His other books include “The Artist in His Studio,” first published in 1960, and “Greece, Gods and Art” (1968).
“The ethical and creative standards that he set for himself and Conde Nast continue to guide us today,” chairman S.I. Newhouse said in a statement Friday. Newhouse described Liberman as “the last direct link to Conde Nast, the man who recognized his talent and hired him, and to Edna Woolman Chase, the founding editor of Vogue.”
Newhouse told WWD that the only “difficult moment” he ever had with Liberman was when he once put a cup of coffee on his editorial director’s desk.
“Never bring coffee into my office,” barked Liberman. “If you spill it, you’ll ruin all these layouts.”
He could also be a charmer.
Newhouse cited an incident when Jessica Daves, the prim-and-proper editor in chief of American Vogue in 1952, “had a stormy reaction” to pictures by Liberman protege Irving Penn. Summoned to Davis’s office, Liberman told her, “What a wonderful hat you’re wearing. it absolutely transforms you,” a remark that immediately disarmed her.
An elegantly energetic man with a dashing mustache, Liberman was a successful painter, photographer, sculptor and writer whose work has been shown in galleries and museums around the world. But it was as editorial director of Conde Nast Publications — his only employer since 1941 — that he exercised his greatest influence.
“I’m not that powerful,” he told WWD in an interview in 1972. Then he paused and said, “I might have a little power in that I personally approve of every color photo which appears in a Conde Nast publication.”
Over the years, Liberman — who was known as “the Silver Fox” — was instrumental in turning Conde Nast into a publishing powerhouse. Under his direction, Vogue moved from an elitist publication with a circulation of less than 200,000 — it was once so haute that only top editors were permitted to wear hats in the office — to a mass-market magazine with more than a million readers. He helped launch such magazines as Vanity Fair, GQ, Self and Allure. With razzle-dazzle layouts and shocking splashes of color, he took a tabloid approach to fashion journalism and made it more accessible to more people.
“His influence goes beyond his title,” Newhouse said several years ago. “He has a fierce intelligence and an analytical mind. He is ultimately responsible for the editorial side….He is very sensitive to what is going on, but yet there is no rigidity in him except for his refusal to compromise.”
Liberman could be a formidable foe or the strongest of allies. Perhaps the most contentious period in his reign at Conde Nast involved his relationship with Diana Vreeland, who blamed him for her departure from Vogue. Some time later, he championed the rise of Anna Wintour.
Wintour, who called Liberman her mentor who “taught me everything,” said, “He was an incredibly cultivated man who could talk to you in depth about the most obscure Russian poet, but then he could take equal joy in talking about ‘Dynasty.’ He had a great sense of humor, he loved to gossip and he loved bad movies. He just took so much pleasure in life.”
Ironically, it was his success in publishing that might have undermined his reputation as an artist. It frustrated him that people were unable to respect the distinction between his life in art and his life as a cultural czar — a separation that was always clear to him.
“Magazine work is not art,” he told Newsweek in 1991. “I am moved by the artistic impulses in these art directors. I tell them, ‘Don’t waste your art on this. Do the magazine work, take the check to support yourself and save your art for your own work. Don’t inflict that on our readers.”‘
It was precisely how he conducted his own life. During the week, he wore smartly cut suits to his midtown office and lived in a town house on East 70th Street. On weekends, he and his wife, Tatiana, traveled to Warren, in northeastern Connecticut. There, he wore work clothes and construction boots while creating his paintings and sculptures. The house was also a magnet for poets, writers, artists and dancers from Russia.
It was in Warren, Oscar de la Renta recalled Friday, that he and Liberman would play backgammon for money on weekends.
“A lot of the time he lost, not because he didn’t play well, but because he used to take big gambles,” de la Renta recalled. “He always claimed that I built my swimming pool in the country with the money that I made playing backgammon with him.”
Diane Von Furstenberg, whose daughter Tatiana was named after Liberman’s wife, called from Barcelona and said, “He and Tatiana were for me like parents. I knew he could be tough at the office, but at home he was an angel and a wonderful, forever-young man.”
In Paris, Pierre Berge, a friend for more than 40 years, called Liberman “a formidable man who completely transformed the American fashion press.”
“He was an artist,” said Berge, “he was elegant and he spoke three languages brilliantly: English, Russian and French. But the most important language he spoke was the unspoken one of art.”
Because he was employed by fashion and lifestyle magazines, however, and because he and Tatiana — who died in April 1991 — were an integral part of New York’s social world, to many people he seemed little more than a dilettante.
“I have always been plagued by suspicions that in some indefinable way I am not quite serious,” he once said. “And that’s because I have a job.”
And yet, his paintings and photographs are in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was described as “one of America’s leading sculptors” by critic Robert Hughes, he was given a major retrospective of his paintings and sculptures by Washington’s Corcoran Gallery and — because he specialized in steel sculptures of monumental proportions — he frequently was commissioned by government agencies and private corporations for public sculpture.
Born in Kiev on Sept. 4, 1912 to wealthy Russian revolutionaries — his father, Simon, was a lumber merchant and his mother, Henriette, directed the State Theater for Children in Moscow — Liberman was a youth of fragile temperament whose family was unusually well connected. When he was nine, he was deemed too high-strung for Moscow’s schools, some of which had already booted him, but was able to attend boarding school in England after his family was granted permission by Lenin himself.
His life education began at St. Piran’s School in England, where he says he was beaten until he stopped crying and smiled.
“I learned an important lesson,” he recalled. “To endure. To take the blows of life with a certain apparent calm.”
In the Twenties, his family moved to France, where he rejoined them. When he was 13, he met Tatiana Iacovleff, the 15-year-old niece of Alexander Iacovleff, a successful painter and a friend of Liberman’s mother. In 1929, Tatiana married Bertrand du Plessix, a French diplomat, and the following year, gave birth to a daughter, Francine (now the author Francine du Plessix Gray).
It was around that time that Liberman suffered the first of a recurrent series of ulcer attacks that were to plague him until 1960, when surgery removed the problem, along with most of his stomach.
He studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1930, and in 1931, his mother’s friendship with Lucien Vogel helped Liberman secure his first job. It was in the art department of Vu, a Paris publication that was a spiritual predecessor of Life magazine. Liberman became art director, then managing editor. He remained there until 1936, when he married Hilda Sturm, a German skier and model, moved to the south of France and began painting landscapes. The marriage lasted less than a year.
Eventually, Liberman was reunited with Tatiana, who had been separated from her husband and who became a widow when he was killed while flying to join Charles de Gaulle. A romance blossomed. In 1941, Liberman and his mother and Tatiana and her daughter all came to the U.S. together. (His father had left for the States three years earlier.)
Lucien Vogel, then working at Glamour, helped arrange a $50-a-week job for Liberman at Vogue. Conde Nast himself took a liking to the young man and began accepting his picture suggestions ahead of those of Mehemed Fehmy Agha, then Vogue’s imperious art director. In little more than a year, Agha was out and Liberman was the magazine’s new art director.
He and Tatiana were married on Nov. 4, 1942. While Liberman was becoming acclimated to Vogue, she joined Henri Bendel as a millinery designer and was then hired by Saks Fifth Avenue, where she was known as “Tatiana of Saks” for 23 years until she retired.
Among the witnesses at Liberman’s wedding to Tatiana were their friends Beatrice and Fernand Leval. A little more than 50 years later, on Dec. 7, 1992, Liberman married for the third time. His new bride was Melinda Pechangco, the nurse who had tended Tatiana and him for more than 20 years. The ceremony, according to “Alex,” the Dodie Kazanjian-Calvin Tomkins biography of Liberman that was published in October 1993, was performed by Judge Pierre Laval — the son of the couple who witnessed his wedding to Tatiana.
In 1960, Liberman became art director of Conde Nast Publications and in 1962, he was named editorial director, a title he would keep for more than three decades. On April 1, 1994, at the age of 81, he was named deputy chairman, editorial. His successor was James Truman, then editor-in-chief of Details magazine.
A memorial service is planned for January, the time and place yet to be determined.