Portrait of a Renaissance Man : Authors: Artist, photographer, editor. Now, with his new book, Alexander Liberman proves that at 83, he’s still reinventing himself.

Alexander Liberman is seated in a white director’s chair in his 5,000-square-foot studio, surrounded by some 200 oversized canvases, his latest watercolors, mostly spare paintings of circles in reds, blues, grays, blurred and refined.

He is 83 and talking about his remarkable life, rather, his many lives, as artist, sculptor, photographer, writer, and editorial conscience and overlord of Conde Nast magazines for more than 30 years years. And, of course, of Tatiana, his great love and late wife of five decades who designed hats for Saks Fifth Avenue and oversaw their high-society and highly cultured clique of friends.

“You see this is a snapshot that records a group of friends,” he says, pausing as he leafs through his just-published book of 160 “snapshots” he has taken since childhood. “But Leland Hayward, the producer, was a very close friend of ours. Bill Paley was less of a friend but Babe was a great friend of mine. Tatiana, look at her here, she had such great style. And Slim Keith, she was to me the great American beauty.”

He is narrating “Then: Photographs 1924-1995” (Random House) in that authoritative voice that bespeaks “czarist Russia, England boarding school and Cole Porter’s New York,” as former Vogue Editor Grace Mirabella once described it.

But then Alex the Cat--the man who has done everything, supported everybody and, despite having part of his stomach removed at age 48, made it all seem effortless--announces that he has moved into yet another life.

He now occupies a Miami penthouse with his third wife, Melinda Pachangco. A few years after Tatiana’s 1991 death and his triple bypass surgery, Liberman married Pachangco, Tatiana’s longtime nurse, and relinquished his duties at Conde Nast. It was then that he began spending most of the year in South Florida. His life there is very regimented, in many ways typical of many other retirees. Each day he paints in the bedroom; he has his siesta after lunch. And then, with Melinda behind the wheel, they drive to a mall and briskly walk two to three miles.

The image of the elegant Mr. Liberman, always perfectly attired in classic suits and trademark blue knit tie, traversing Dadeland, past the food courts and the sneaker stores, is slightly appalling.

But not really.

“I find it fascinating,” he says. “I find the clothes that Melinda looks at on the racks an education about American life. I also love to see all the young beauties.”

Liberman has always embraced change on his own terms. In fact, he has probably seen and supervised more change than anyone except Guttenberg. At Conde Nast, he was renowned for mixing high- and low-fashion journalism--the clean, pure style of photographer Irving Penn and the edgy look of Helmut Newton, whose photos Liberman would lay out to appear as if they had been ripped off a page.

Si Newhouse, chairman of Conde Nast, once said that Liberman was indispensable because he refused to lock in to one point of view.

“He is not predisposed to like or not like things,” Newhouse said when interviewed for a 1993 biography on Liberman. “He deals with magazines as live practical problems that change and have to change over the years. . . .”

*

Born in revolutionary Moscow in 1912, Liberman was sent off at age 8 to an English boarding school by his well-connected businessman father, with the approval of Lenin and Trotsky. Four years later the family moved to Paris, where his mother fell in love with a successful Russian emigre painter named Alexander Iacovleva, whose niece, 15-year-old Tatiana, would become Alex’s playmate.

During the Depression, their families would lose their fortunes; Alex and Tatiana would each marry another, divorce, become friends again, make their way together in 1941 to New York and a year later marry.

Once in America, with his mother, Tatiana, and her daughter to support, Liberman found a $50-a-week job at Conde Nast. (In Paris, he had been managing editor of Vu, a journal that introduced France to photojournalism.) He quickly ascended--within a year to art director of Vogue, a year later to chief art director overseeing 13 magazines and finally to editorial director.

By 1946, he had financial security, a whirlwind social life, a high-stakes career and a well-developed ulcer. But he was not fulfilling his dream to paint.

“I think I was like Gen. [Colin] Powell. You know he said you have to have a certain fire. I don’t think I had that fire for art. It was a smoldering fire not a raging one, and I found, being a refugee, being ill, I wanted something of a life. I didn’t want to die for art.”

His interest in abstract Expressionism ultimately led him to visit and photograph artists’ studios all over Europe and eventually collect the pictures for a book that was published in 1988.

“I wanted to see what would my life have been if I had been a full-time artist,” he says. “I was extremely depressed. With one or two exceptions, the artists were all impoverished.”

But in the late 1940s Liberman became serious about leading a double life--a workhorse at Conde Nast during the week and an artist on the weekends. By 1959, he had had his third ulcer attack and, perhaps as an antidote to stress, he took up sculpting. The next year surgeons removed two-thirds of his stomach, giving him great relief and new energy for his art.

*

In three decades he rarely got a good review, yet his work now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum here. Being called a second-rate artist all those years never slowed him, he says. For the satisfaction was all his. “I feel both careers helped each other.

“My so-called success at Vogue, at Conde Nast, gave me a certain courage when I did my own work. When I attacked the canvas, I knew right behind, pushing me a little, was the feeling: ‘I can succeed here too.’ That confidence resulted in my doing sculptures 50 feet high out of huge pieces of steel.

“And when I came in Monday morning after having manipulated enormous things in an open field, a magazine page was like a little toy.”

At the same time he was experiencing critical rejection for his art, Liberman was receiving rave reviews for his work on the magazines, particularly Vogue.

Always changing, moving quickly, he kept up with trends and predicted a few. He used famous abstract paintings as backdrops for fashion shoots; he added cultural features in an effort to educate American women; he championed new European designers, and always he was fanatical about detail.

Even Mirabella, who disses Liberman in her recent memoirs for allowing current Vogue Editor Anna Wintour to usurp her, writes about him with mixed emotions. He was controlling but gifted.

“He would regularly make mincemeat out of art directors, redoing their work in front of them, reassigning their stories, humiliating them before assistants,” she writes in “In and Out of Vogue.” But if she made a good argument against one of his layouts, he might go back to the drawing board. “His pride in his craft, his need for perfection, was more powerful even than his ego. . . .”

Wintour agrees that while Liberman could be mercurial, he was driven not by whimsy but rather by a refined aesthetic. “He changed his mind a lot but always for real reasons,” she says.

Of his style, Liberman says, “I never wrote a memo; I never said, ‘I hate this,’ or any other expression of real violent displeasure. I would sometimes be silent, or say something vaguely to indicate something could be different. Sometimes, art directors would follow me and sometimes they would not.”

Pity those who didn’t.

A few years ago, Newton reminded Liberman of how heartless he could be. “Once when Helmut called me from a shoot in Hawaii to say it was raining, I told him, ‘I don’t want to hear about the weather. Do the pictures.’ And he went off and took some wonderful pictures.

“I think you have to be in a way tough and straightforward. You couldn’t be gentle with photographers. With editors you have to a bit easier, but they too had to understand.”

*

After overseeing 32 years of Conde Nast’s wild successes and occasional bombs, Liberman finally gave it up in 1994, delivering his title to a handpicked successor, James Truman, a then-35-year-old Brit who had been editor of Details magazine.

Liberman won’t comment on Truman’s performance or on how magazines will compete with the Internet. (“I once used a computer to do a layout,” he says. “It was too slow.”)

Yet, there are hints that he is not totally removed--nor will he ever be.

Wintour says she consults with her “good friend” on a regular basis. Just last week he called to comment on her use of some Penn photographs.

“Oh, he was very positive,” she says, quickly adding: “He’s very respectful of James’ position but he still has many friends around here and he always will.”

Yes, it’s all in the family. Which is why his new book has received mentions in Conde Nast magazines including the New Yorker, edited by his “dear friend” Tina Brown, whose husband, Harry Evans, happens to be publisher of Random House, which is owned by Newhouse.

“I’ll always be interested in my friends’ work,” he says, staring dreamily around his studio, at his circles in brilliant red and depressing gray. “These human contacts, I need them. Just like I need my art, I need these people who have been my life.”

Or at least one of many lives.