V&A Museum
Room 74
On view through 18 November 2007
A display exploring the ground-breaking work of the two Russian émigré-designers, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman during their tenures as art directors at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, during the 1940s and 1950s.
By examining influences from 1920s European avant-garde design and the resultant experiments with typography and page-layout, combined with the incubation of emerging photographers such as Richard Avedon and William Klein, this display highlights the new directions forged by Brodovitch and Liberman in photography and graphic design.
In the early half of the twentieth century, the design of American fashion magazines was changed forever more by the arrival of these two Russian émigrés. Both men had fled the Russian Revolution and worked as designers in Paris, absorbing radical ideas of the European avant-garde. Making their way to New York, they found positions as art directors of the country's leading glossy magazines: Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar and Liberman at Vogue. Brodovitch and Liberman sought to modernise magazine graphics and to bring photography to the fore. Their magazine articles often resembled stills from a film - snapshots from a cinematic dream sequence. Both men had tense relationships with their editors, insisting on complete creative control, a freedom which art directors take for granted today.
The display features photographs, prints, photobooks and vintage copies of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue from this period.
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