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Alexander Liberman painting on Board

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Artist: Liberman, Alexander (Russian/American 1912-1999)
Title: Black Run
Date: 1964
Medium: acrylic on wood panel
Dimensions: 16 x 16 inches
Description: an interesting color field painting
Signature: signed dated and tiled on masonite reverse
ALEXANDER LIBERMAN : (American, b. Russia 1912 - d. 1999) Painter , Sculptor , Photographer , Editor/Publisher Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman was born on September 4th, 1912 in Kiev Russia. His father was in the timber business and his mother was involved in the Russian theater. When his father took a post advising the Soviet government, the family moved to Moscow. Life there became difficult, and his father secured permission from Lenin and the Politburo to take the boy to London in 1921. Young Liberman was educated in England and later studied in Paris, France, and took up life as a White emigre in Paris. He began his publishing career in Paris with the early pictorial magazine Vu, where he worked under Lucien Vogel and became friends with photographers such as Brassai, André Kertész, and Robert Capa. After emigrating to New York in 1941, he began working for Conde Nast Publications, rising to the position of Editorial Director, which he held from 1962-1994. During his long tenure at VOGUE, Liberman commissioned artists such as: Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns to work on projects for the magazine. He was the only publisher granted the rights to reproduce images of Matisse's chapel in Vence, France. He also had Jackson Pollock's paintings used as a backdrop for a fashion shoot by Sir Cecil Beaton, as there was no other way to get Pollock's work reproduced in the magazine. He was briefly married (August 25, 1936) Hildegarde Sturm, a model and competitive skier. His second wife (since 1942), Tatiana Yacovleff du Plessix Liberman (1906-1991), had been a childhood playmate and baby sitter. In 1941, they escaped together from occupied France, via Lisbon, to New York. She had operated a hat salon in Paris, then designed hats for Henri Bendel in New York. She continued in millinery at Saks Fifth Avenue until the mid-1950s, where she was billed as "Tatania du Plessix" or "Tatania of Saks". In 1992 he married Melinda Pechangco, a nurse who had cared for Tatiana during an earlier illness. His stepdaughter, Francine du Plessix Gray, is a noted author. Alexander Liberman died in Miami November 19, 1999. Only in the 1950s did Liberman take up painting and, later, metal sculpture. His highly recognizable sculptures are assembled from industrial objects (segments of steel I-beams, pipes, drums, etc.,) often painted in uniform bright colors. Prominent examples are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Laumeier Sculpture Park, Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, The Tate Gallery, and the Guggenheim Museum; and his paintings drawings and prints can be found at The Columbia Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Fogg Museum at Harvard University, The Princeton University Art Museum, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, The DeCordova Museum , and The Tate Gallery in London among many others.

in good condition apart from some minor surface scratching and rubbing to the corners

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