Fashionable visionary

Alexander Liberman was a victim of his own impeccable taste. His European sophistication and flair for the visual helped propel him to the top of the magazine world as the editorial director of Conde Nast, which he ruled for 34 years before his death in 1999.

His unerring eye was trained in part by his lifelong passion for art, which he pursued as creator, consumer and intimate. And his expertise in art helped him surf Conde Nast’s notorious political maelstroms, ensuring his remarkably long tenure at the top; S.I. Newhouse Jr., who became chairman in 1975, shared Liberman’s love of art, and the men spent many lunch hours cruising art galleries for possible purchases.

But Liberman’s success in the world of fashion prompted many art world habitues to sniff at his paintings for many years, although Liberman was ultimately recognized as an important artist by top critics, curators and gallery owners. Still, he never entirely overcame the stigma. “I have always been plagued,” Liberman once said, “by suspicions that in some indefinable way I am not quite serious. And that’s because I have a job.”

Before any of that, before Liberman was exalted to the position of national tastemaker and before the public was introduced to his paintings and sculpture, he was a serious photographer. He used the camera as a fact-finding tool in the world of aesthetics, and he aimed it at the most important artists of his day.

Liberman bequeathed his collection of 100,000 photographs and negatives -- which included illustrations for his books on Marlene Dietrich; Campidoglio, the Roman capitol designed by Michelangelo; the Greek gods; and famous people he knew -- to the Getty Research Institute. The first show from the collection, “Photographs of Artists by Alexander Liberman,” opens there Tuesday and runs through Oct. 19.

Liberman’s portraits of artists were culled for the show in keeping with the “Biography” theme for research projects undertaken by the institute’s visiting scholars in 2002-03. The exhibition includes 71 photographs of such important Europeans and Americans as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning taken from 1949 to 1977, many never before shown or published. Most of the prints are in black and white, which tended to be in better shape than the color photos in the collection, and all but two are Liberman’s original prints.

Liberman began photographing artists in 1948, after he started working at Vogue magazine as art director, a position he held for 17 years. That summer, the Russian-born Liberman returned to Paris, where he had lived off and on as a teenager and young adult until his family fled the Nazis in 1941. There he sought out Georges Braque, who opened his studio to Liberman.

That visit launched a decade of summers that found him returning to France to photograph and interview the aging artists of the School of Paris as well as the preserved studios of artists who had passed away.

At first Liberman regarded the trips as a personal project, but it didn’t take long before his pictures began appearing in Vogue’s glossy pages. The first set ran in December 1951 to illustrate another writer’s piece about the chapel that Henri Matisse designed in Vence, France. Liberman’s first photo essay for Vogue, which featured Braque, ran in 1954. It was the first of many to be published that decade as Liberman introduced Vogue’s pages to 20th century art, not only in artist profiles but also as a backdrop for fashion shoots.

In 1959, the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of his photographs of artists, which was the first show of any of his work. The next year they were published in “The Artist in His Studio,” which included his essays about 39 artists.

Liberman had spent that decade painting nothing but circles, predating Minimalism, but he was unable to pique the interest of the eminent art dealer Betty Parsons. Parsons represented Liberman’s friend Barnett Newman but considered his work unsalable.

So his friend William S. Leiberman, then curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, helped him out, according to the 1993 biography “Alex,” by Dodie Kazanjian and Calvin Tomkins. Leiberman called Parsons to say the press release for the MoMA photography show was being prepared and he needed to know the date of Liberman’s one-man show at her gallery.

Parsons immediately responded with a date, but she was right about his commercial prospects. His paintings didn’t become popular with collectors until the late ‘60s.

Liberman also photographed artists of the New York School, and the show is broadly divided between artists in France and the U.S., then subdivided according to chapters in Liberman’s life, says Getty Research Institute research associate Glenn Phillips, who curated the show. In one group are some of the first artists Liberman met during his summers in France -- Matisse, Braque and Marie Laurencin.

Another group includes Paris-based artists Liberman and his family had known in Russia -- Marc Chagall, Fernand Leger , Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova.

Picasso was an endless source of fascination for Liberman, who returned many times to photograph him in Paris, Vallauris and Mougins. During a 1954 visit to Vallauris, Picasso asked Liberman about his own work.

Liberman used a stick to draw a circle in the dust on the floor, and as he began to erase it, Picasso stopped him, declaring that the circle would be forever part of his studio.

Liberman would tell the story of Picasso’s invitation to drop everything and move to France for several months to make art alongside him. When Liberman declined, Picasso retreated to the back seat of his Hispano-Suiza limousine for a good sulk, Phillips says. Liberman’s portrait of the dejected artist is included in the show.

The show contrasts Picasso’s studio with Constantin Brancusi’s, demonstrating different ways in which an artist’s studio can be a form of portraiture. Indeed, Brancusi’s Paris studio was the closest Liberman could come to making a portrait of him. The artist refused to be photographed, believing that a camera would take his soul and his life.

Picasso’s Paris studio was a study in disarray, and Liberman focused his lens on still lifes of the artist’s clutter arrangements of clay models with bare lightbulbs and empty frames.

Picasso claimed he never moved objects in his studio, but Liberman’s contact sheets show otherwise.

The exhibit illustrates how contact sheets can be used for scholarly detective work. A photo of Marcel Duchamp lost in thought invites viewers to guess whether the shot was posed or candid. The answer lies in the contact sheet exhibited alongside, which shows the camera circling Duchamp as he goes through a sequence of natural-looking movements.

Photos of artists at work offer insights into the creative process. A sequence of hands illustrates various artists’ relationships to their materials. Alberto Giacometti holds a brush at the very end, so that each stroke is amplified. Jacques Villon squeezes paint from a tube onto a paper palette, which he tossed after the painting was completed.

One photograph that Phillips enlarged from a contact sheet illustrates how Helen Frankenthaler handled paint. “I always imagined her pouring it,” Phillips says. “I was intrigued by how well you could see her pushing it around on the canvas. I’d never realized that before.”

Liberman had considered producing an American version of his artists’ book, which would have been titled “Nine Americans” -- Frankenthaler, De Kooning, Newman, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, David Smith and Robert Motherwell. He never completed the project, but he did go so far as to produce page layouts with his color photographs, which are in the show.

Smith is also featured in a series of black-and-white photographs that documented a weekend Liberman spent with the sculptor in Bolton Landing, N.Y., in 1965. Liberman had begun creating large metal sculptures from discarded machine parts, so Frankenthaler and Motherwell decided to introduce him to Smith. During the visit, Smith encouraged Liberman to create colossal public sculptures, which eventually landed in MoMA’s sculpture garden and the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. Two weeks after the visit, Smith was killed in a motorcycle accident.

The elegant Liberman, nicknamed “the Silver Fox” at Conde Nast, had unusual access to the century’s top artists partly because he and his wife, hat designer Tatiana of Saks, presided over one of New York’s great salons. With a hefty company expense account, they regularly threw parties for artists, writers, critics and titled Europeans at their Upper East Side apartment. Liberman still managed to dedicate his weekends to making art. But he never shared the esteem enjoyed by the subjects of his camera lens.

While he had “earned the right to be ranked among the most original and genuinely creative talents of our time,” the critic Lawrence Campbell wrote in ARTnews, “many critics have been unable to forget or forgive the fact that part of Liberman’s life is devoted to the world of high fashion.”