Not many could begin their career as a White Russian hussar astride a horse, serving in Romania, and finish as the very first art director of Harper’s Bazaar, in New York City. But Alexey Brodovitch, born in 1898, never wanted for imagination. Opening tomorrow at the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia, “Alexey Brodovitch: Astonish Me” revisits this pioneer of graphic design and photography, whose avant-garde vision is immortalized in the 1957 film Funny Face (with the character of Dovitch). The exhibition aims to introduce his groundbreaking achievements to a wider audience.
Brodovitch arrived in Paris in 1920, penniless, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution. There he began to paint scenes for Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes and designed book covers and department-store posters. Yet, despite acclaim, he grew restless with clients who preferred the prevailing Art Deco style. Brodovitch loved to experiment.
In 1930, he was lured to Philadelphia to teach advertising and commercial design at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art. His classes and design labs were transformative: he synthesized his previous intersections with Surrealism, Dada, and Constructivism and introduced modernism to the traditional curriculum.
In 1934, Brodovitch was hired by Harper’s Bazaar. As art director, he seized oversight of layouts and redefined the job to include control of typography, photography, and illustration, from a project’s inception to print. He claimed this authority despite two divas hanging over his shoulder: editor Carmel Snow, who prized innovation, and fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who defined modernity. Together these three took fashion on the road, commingling art, culture, and contemporary events, helping readers imagine themselves in a fabulous new world.
From New York, Brodovitch commuted to Philadelphia for his sought-after Design Laboratory classes. When that became too challenging, he relaunched them at New York’s New School, in 1941, where he became legendary for the new crop of photographers he mentored—Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn, and Lisette Model among them. Taking a page from Diaghilev, Brodovitch told his students, “Astonish me!,” though his prickly personality sometimes got in the way of the message. He suggested he was merely a “can opener” who extracted their most inventive qualities. The photographer Ted Croner said that Brodovitch was “a little like the sand that gets into the oyster and makes a pearl.”
At Harper’s Bazaar, the first photographer Brodovitch commissioned was Man Ray, whose “rayograph” of a couture gown set the radical tone: he made it look like a Brancusi. As time went on, no angle became too dramatic, no object too distorted—your eye might literally fly off the page. Brodovitch biographer Kerry William Purcell wrote, “Images had the freedom to run, jump, dance.” The designer played with typeface and layout—bleeding, cropping, flipping scale. Models were caught mid-action, thus creating the illusion of continued movement through the pages—like a film. Brodovitch also used the new technology of the Xerox and performed what he called “acrobatics”—turning a mediocre shot into a great one.
Despite long martini lunches, he also made time for outside projects that included furniture and book designs. In 1945, Brodovitch produced two important books. Ballet is a revered experiment, a collection of onstage and backstage images drawn from slow shutter speeds, no flash, and, as he confessed, “beautiful accidents in the darkroom.” Days of Paris was a nostalgic collaboration with the photographer André Kertész, who considered it one of his best collections. Observations (1959)—photographs of renowned personalities shot by Avedon, with text by Truman Capote and design by Brodovitch—combined the synergy of three talents at the top of their game. Portfolio, a graphic-design magazine on which Brodovitch collaborated, beginning in 1950, was at last able to occasionally relieve him from the constraints of advertising pages.
Brodovitch chartered an era of gutsy design joined with commerce. But alcoholism and depression eventually hit their mark. After many hospitalizations, he returned to France, where he died in 1971.
“Alexey Brodovitch: Astonish Me” will be on at the Barnes, in Philadelphia, beginning March 3
Patricia Zohn has contributed to numerous publications, including Wallpaper, Artnet, the Huffington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times
