for an exhibition design in the Paris World’s Fair of 1937 ], and we talked.”
At the time Nast was fighting against the clichés of fashion presentation,
such as obscure typography and strange handwritten titles. Nast admired the
newly started Lifemagazine and wanted Vogueto be more modern, in fact,
more like a newsmagazine. “So when he learned from Vogel that I had been
involved with a newsmagazine he was very excited.. .” continued Liberman.
“He said ‘a man like you must be on Vogue.’ He asked Agha to come in and
said ‘I want Liberman on Vogue.’ Since Condé was an absolute monarch,
Agha never told him he had fired me.”
Liberman’s success was further guaranteed not just because Nast
valued the young Liberman’s judgment, but also because he was taken
under the wing of the former editor of Vanity Fair, Frank Crowninshield,
who, since the demise of his own magazine had been the fine arts
consultant editor of Vogue. One day during Liberman’s first month on the
job he was playing with a Horst photograph of a girl in a bathing suit lying
on her back balancing a beach ball on her feet. He substituted the O in
Voguefor the ball, which had no fixed logo in those days. “Crowninshield
happened to be walking through the art department... he stopped to look
at Alex’s design, which impressed him enormously,” wrote Kazanjian and
Tompkins. “‘There’s a genius in the art department,’ he told Nast.”
In those days fashion plates were photographed in their hats and
“royal robes.” The main Voguepages were created in Paris and arrived in New
York entirely laid out. When Liberman was appointed Vogue’s art director in
1942 he rebelled against Parisian dominance. “I had always resented the fussy,
feminine, condescending approach to women by women’s magazines,” he
asserted. “I thought it was important to shake up this rather somnolent
society. If we had to show hats, I tried to mix hats with contemporary life.”
He also introduced art into fashion photography, and had Cecil Beaton
photograph a model in front of some Jackson Pollock paintings. He admired
the lack of artifice in photographs by portraitists Nadar, Atget, and August
Sander. “Fortunately, Irving Penn came into my life,” Liberman boasted. “He
worked as an assistant with me in the art department on design and layout
until one day I said, ‘Why don’t you go and take the picture.’”
Clarity and strength of communication are what interested
Liberman. He admitted that graphic design for its own sake was
meaningless, and was never so “sensitized to type” that a sixteenth of a
millimeter spacing mattered. He rejected fancy typefaces and in 1947
changed the logo of Voguefrom an elegant Bodoni to Franklin Gothic,
which he claims until then was only used in newspapers. “I thought it had
strength and looked modern. All the captions and the titles were set in
Franklin Gothic, which was then revolutionary in women’s publications.”
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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