Vogue
Alexander LibermanFor Alexander Liberman ( 1912 – 1999 ), the
Russian-born art director of Vogueand
later editorial director of Condé Nast from
1942 to 1995 , design was a means. Making
elegant layouts was never an end. Nor was
it his métier. “Elegance was [Alexey]
Brodovitch’s strong point,” Liberman
exclaimed in the authorized biography
Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1995 ), “The page looked
very attractive. But in a way, it seemed to
me that Brodovitch was serving the same
purpose that [M. F.] Agha [art director of
Vogue] had served, which was to make the
magazine attractive to women—not
interesting to women.” Liberman wanted
to break the design obsession, “so I
defended a more journalistic approach—
rougher lettering, no white space, crowded pages, messier layouts.” Some of
the more elegant layouts in Voguethroughout the 1950 s (the ones that are
celebrated in the Art Directors Club annuals) were either designed by his
associate Pricilla Peck or produced in spite of himself because Vogue’s
editor-in-chief, Edna Chase, was not interested in messy layouts. “He was
tilting at windmills,” argued biographers Dodie Kazanjian and Calvin
Tompkins about his preference for tabloid-styled typography.
Liberman became a layout man in 1933 for VU, the illustrated
French weekly, where he worked with photojournalists such as André
Kertész, Robert Capa, and Brassaï. They had not yet become the great
photographers or as Liberman said: “There was no cult of photography at
that time.” But with them he learned how to effectively lay out tension-
packed visual essays. In 1940 Lucien Vogel, the creator of VU, had come
to America to work with Condé Nast and urged the publisher to bring
Liberman to America as well. Upon arriving he did layouts for Vogue(at fifty
dollars a week), until one day Agha unceremoniously fired him. “That was
on Friday,” Liberman recalled. “On Monday Condé Nast asked to see me,
not knowing I had been fired. I brought my gold medal [which he received82