In the following video, Vogue‘s legendary editorial director Alexander Liberman is interviewed by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, for the television program Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography. This program was part of the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.
From the 1930s to the 1990s, Alexander Liberman was an important figure in the art world, and developed a special relationship with photography and photographers, many of them being also influenced by his artistic vision.
In 1929, he was hired by Lucien Vogel at Vu magazine, where he worked with reportage photography. After a year, he became art director and then editor-in-chief of the magazine, 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.
By the middle of the Second World War, he had established a close working relationship with Irving Penn. Over the course of his career, he also worked with many great fashion photographers, including Horst P. Horst, Cecil Beaton, Henry Clarke, Erwin Blumenfeld and William Klein. He introduced various art forms to Vogue.
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 in 1960.
The book The Artist in His Studio, by Alexander Liberman, can be purchased on Abe Books.
