Alexander Liberman stands in a field in Warren, Conn., dwarfed by a recently completed sculpture he calls “Aria.” More than 50 feet high, the majestic red-painted steel twists and turns as it climbs skyward. Like all of Liberman’s sculptures, it is abstract. “I suppose it expresses my deepest yearnings,” he says. Back on Madison Avenue a few days later, Liberman cuts a larger-than-life figure as he designs a story for Self magazine. Assistants are crowding around him, watching his every move, as he playfully experiments with batches of colored photocopies and piles of printed letters. For a story called “Solitude,” Liberman chooses a photograph of a lone figure at the shore. Then he picks up three orange copies of the letter S and overlaps them, creating a vibrant, noisy display for the headline. “You expect to see something tranquil,” he says. “What is interesting is to go against expectations.”
Liberman is not bothered by contradictions–in fact, he thrives on them. For half a century he has been commuting between two worlds. Although he has made his mark as an artist and photographer, his fame and power come from the trendy world of women’s fashion magazines. At 78, the editorial director of Conde Nast is the cultural czar of one of the world’s largest magazine empires, built on 12 mass-circulation publications including Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Self and Allure, a new magazine just being launched. The position makes him one of the most influential figures in magazine publishing, and speculation about who will inherit his power fuels hours of gossip in midtown Manhattan.
Liberman celebrates his 50th anniversary with Conde Nast this year. He began as an assistant in Vogue’s art department and became art director two years later. Under Liberman, Vogue was transformed from an elitist haute couture publication that reached few than 200,000 readers in the 1940s to a mass-market magazine with a current circulation of more than a million. Along the way he betrayed an instinct for survival in an organization known for its byzantine power plays and titanic ego clashes. His Vogue nickname (the Silver Fox) fits him like a butter-soft Hermes glove. The cultivated, courtly man with the trim mustache and silver-gray hair has clearly combined a genius for design with a talent for negotiating the slippery corridors of power–a gift as important as his legendary eye.
In Conde Nast’s gray-carpeted hallways, famous Vogue editors such as Diana Vreeland and Grace Mirabella have come and gone, eventually cut down by sagging sales or corporate maneuvering, but Liberman remains and prospers. He’s even managed to keep his hands clean. Although Mirabella, who considered Liberman her friend and mentor during her 17 years as editor in chief of Vogue, learned of her dismissal on a TV gossip show, she can’t bring herself to blame Liberman. “I think it probably wasn’t his idea,” she says. “Alex should have told me it was going to happen, but he hates unpleasant confrontations.”
Unpleasantness isn’t part of the Conde Nast corporate culture. “They sprinkle fairy dust in the elevator,” says one staff member. “But you still wind up getting the message when they don’t like what you’re doing.” If they don’t like it for long enough, you lose your job. Liberman’s critics depict him as a kind of Teflon executive: when a magazine slips, they say, the editor gets blamed; when a magazine succeeds, everyone gives the credit to Liberman. Last month, when industry observers criticized the new beauty magazine Allure as confusing and hypocritical (for announcing it wouldn’t dictate what women should look like and then telling four celebrities how to redo their makeup), it was the editors, not Liberman–who had helped produce the first issue–who took the heat.
Some former high-level employees say that disagreeing with Liberman can prove fatal. Others, like Vanity Fair’s editor Tina Brown, argue that he appreciates intelligent disagreement; he simply has no patience for mediocrity. Liberman minimizes his own influence. “What power?” he asks. “You mean because I choose pink instead of blue?”
He is too modest. Liberman’s taste influences every Conde Nast magazine. In spite of his age, at 9 a.m. he is in his sparsely decorated office–his command center for decisions about covers and layouts as well as arrangements for his latest art commissions. When a magazine is in trouble–as Self was in 1989–it is Liberman who suggests the cure. Perhaps most important, Liberman has the ear of Conde Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr., who consults him on problems as varied as personnel changes and art collecting. Liberman’s very longevity is part of his power. He has become the soul and memory of Conde Nast, the bearer of its tradition and standards.
When Liberman arrived at Vogue, its tone was set by Conde Nast himself, the publishing executive who bought the magazine in 1909. (The Newhouse family took over in 1957.) Nast kept the Social Register on his desk, and anyone not listed in it couldn’t be photographed for Vogue. The magazine was so status-conscious that only editors were permitted to wear hats. When a young woman asked Nast for a promotion, he consented. She didn’t get a raise, but she could come to work in a hat. The new art director, who had come from the French photojournalism magazine Vu, brought a touch of real life to the rarefied world of the Vogue reader. “I wanted to try to shake the perfume-box taste out of women’s magazines,” he says. Liberman loved the aggressive graphics of tabloid journalism so much that he used to paste the front page of the New York Post on the bulletin board in Vogue’s art department. He splashed action photographs across Vogue’s pages, messing up the theatrical fashion format.
Liberman also thought Vogue had a cultural mission. He introduced innovative artists and photographers, sending Cecil Beaton to shoot models in front of a Jackson Pollock exhibit in the early 1950s, for example. In a spread on women’s hats, he inserted a photograph of a Mondrian painting. “I wanted to show that these two visions were contemporary,” he says, “that a women wearing this hat might like that Mondrian.”
In spite of the energy needed to guide Vogue in those early years, his art work didn’t suffer. Liberman painted prolifically, and in 1960 he published “The Artist in His Studio,” a photographic record of the studios of many of the great artists living in France. In 1963 he began sculpting. By the 1970s, his work had gained more recognition and now decorates major museums around the country. At the same time, Vogue began to change again.
But this time the impetus didn’t come from Liberman. It came from S.I. Newhouse Jr., who took over from his father as CEO in 1975. Newhouse was looking for a larger audience. He is a great believer in “reader response,” ordering up weekly surveys of readers’ reactions and examining circulation figures carefully. If the figures are down, adjustments are made. By the late ’70s, Liberman no longer chose the most experimental photos for Vogue. “Liberman found the trick of walking a middle ground–making high art more accessible and making the low tabloid end more chic,” says Derek Ungless, creative director of Details magazine. Nowadays, Liberman cares as much about how the magazines sell as how they look. “It’s a business, after all,” he says. Critics complain that too much attention to reader reaction makes the magazines followers rather than leaders. Newhouse disagrees. “We don’t follow circulation like a fever chart,” Newhouse says, “We look for patterns over time.”
Still, Newhouse and Liberman don’t wait forever. Guillaume Bruneau, owner of In Fashion magazine, left his job as art director at Mademoiselle because he refused to give up his subtle visual style when the circulation figures sagged. Liberman is just as hard on himself. When advertisers didn’t like his jazzy use of color blocks for Self, he stepped back and allowed a redesign. “Magazine work is not art,” Liberman says. “I am moved by the artistic impulses in these art directors. I tell them, “Don’t waste your art on this. Do the magazine work, take the check to support yourself and save your art for your own work. Don’t inflict that on our readers.'”
One key to Liberman’s complexities is his personal history. The son of Russian revolutionaries, he was, by his own account, a neurotic boy unsuited for socialist rigors. When Alex was 9, Lenin himself gave permission for the boy to be educated in England. He attended a boarding school where, he says, he was beaten until he smiled. “I learned an important lesson,” he said. “To endure. To take the blows of life with a certain apparent calm.” Some blows were harsh. In 1941 Liberman and his family, then living in France, fled again–this time from the Nazis–and moved to New York. They took with them Liberman’s childhood friend Tatiana du Plessix, whom he later married, and her daughter, Francine (now the writer Francine du Plessix Gray). Liberman took a job in the art department at Vogue. “I wanted a refuge, where I could earn my living and then concentrate on my art,” he says.
He paid a price for his magazine success. In the art world, for a long time he was dismissed as a dilettante. “I have always been plagued,” Liberman has said, “by suspicions that in some indefinable way I am not quite serious. And that’s because I have a job.” Art critic John Russell, who believes Liberman has “made a significant contribution as a painter and sculptor,” says that even today “his reputation at Conde Nast is a handicap to his reputation as an artist.”
His art, however, has helped him at Conde Nast. S.I. Newhouse says he doesn’t even want to think of a successor. Liberman is unique. He inhabits two demanding worlds; the tension only seems to charge his productivity. And Conde Nast also offers him a base. “Art is a solitary, lonely, tormented process,” he says. “Conde Nast is my home. To be surrounded by a seemingly admiring group of people gives me security and inner strength. Conde Nast has not just supported me monetarily. It has nourished me and my art.”
