Portfolio^75
Alexey BrodovitchPortfolio, published between 1949 and 1951 ,
was the model of a twentieth-century graphic
and industrial arts magazine. It elevated
design and set the standard of magazine
layout that few publications then or now
could equal. “The format itself should be a
graphic experience,” editor Frank Zachary
explained. The hefty nine-by-twelve-inch
periodical designed by Alexey Brodovitch
( 1898 – 1971 ) incorporated special inserts,
including shopping bags, wallpaper, and
three-dimensional glasses. And publisher
George Rosenthal, Jr., spared no expense in
buying the best paper and the best of
everything else.
“Then we decided to sell
advertising,” recalled Zachary. “Well, we
hated the ads we got. So we said, ‘Hell, we’re not going to mar our
beautiful magazine with crummy ads.’ We were terribly idealistic.” Void
of such visual encumbrances,Portfoliowas a hybrid, part book and part
magazine. A subscription cost twelve dollars a year for four issues and a
few thousand people subscribed. Rosenthal handled the finances, while
Zachary developed the writers. He also collected all the photographs and
illustrations for the stories.
Convention dictated that magazine covers be pictorial. But the
first issue of Portfoliowas like no other; it was type design, transparent
process-color squares printed over the Portfoliologo which was dropped out
of black. Like a main title for a motion picture, the cover introduced the
cinematic interior. Brodovitch, the acclaimed art director for Harper’s
Bazaar, who introduced the new photography to fashion magazines, paced
his layouts as though they were storyboards for films. The key to success
was dynamic juxtapositions: big and small, bold and quiet, type and
pictorial. Brodovitch splayed comps out on the floor, mixing and matching,
moving pages and entire stories around as needed.
Zachary planned the issues with Brodovitch at his office at
Harper’s Bazaar. “We got along very well because I let him have his head,”