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The Modern Master of Magazine Design
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17208 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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2 / 1990 |
1,574 Words |
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Eric Gibson
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Near the beginning of Andy Grundberg's monograph on the late Alexey Brodovitch the author observes, "He was successful in attracting attention to the page without attracting attention to himself."
Although Grundberg does not intend it so, this might well stand as a summary of the defining difference between the present moment and an earlier time in all creative endeavors, not simply that of graphic design. It is the kind of observation that does more than characterize a man, it sums up an era. Brodovitch (1898-1971) belonged to an age in which the guiding principle, albeit an unspoken one, was "the extinction of personality." The term comes from T.S. Eliot's famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and what he is describing is the need for the poet to subordinate all ego to the task of mastering his craft.
At the time Eliot wrote those lines, that sort of attitude was the norm among creative individuals of all varieties, not just poets. The idea was simply to be able to do your work; success was making a living at it. In the case of artists, exhibiting was desired, but it was also something that happened well along in life - not the day after graduating from art school. Above all, it was the individual's work that counted the most. There was never any question - not on the part of the artist, anyway - of allowing one's public persona to compete with one's work in the marketplace for public attention.
Change in Climate
What a different climate we live in today! Arguably since the day in 1949 when Life magazine catapulted Jackson Pollock to fame with its interrogative headline, "Is Jackson Pollock the Greatest Painter in America?" but most seriously since the sixties, the personality or public face of the artist has been as self-consciously constructed and as shrewdly marketed as anything manufactured in the studio. Andy Warhol, Gilbert and George, Julian Schnabel - the list is virtually endless. And to say that this premium on celebrity has corrupted everything about the way art is made, marketed, and experienced is to utter the merest commonplace.
It is one of the many pleasures of this well-written and beautifully produced book that it beckons us to an earlier time. Indeed, in more than one respect Brodovitch was part of an earlier era, almost an age of innocence. For he was in fact Russian by birth, born into the landed aristocracy. During World War I, he rose to the rank of commanding officer. Yet like so many of his class, he found himself impoverished and displaced when the Russian Revolution came. He finally wound up in Paris with no particular skills, falling into a line of work with which he was to become identified for the rest of his life: graphic design.
But although Brodovitch was highly successful in Paris, it was from the time of his move to the United States (initially to Philadelphia) in 1930 that his influence dates. For in his work at Harper's Bazaar from 1934 to 1958 and through his celebrated "Design Laboratory" at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Design (which was later to be known as the Philadelphia College of Art) novel design ideas were widely disseminated, influencing both the students of his own era - Marvin Israel, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn among them - as well as the graphic designers of a subsequent generation, and influence visible today in the work of
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