Focus

by Michael Gross

  Michel de Brunhoff, the editor in chief of French Vogue, would receive unknown artists on Fridays between three and five in the afternoon. “Every Friday I would wait, with a large group of fellow sufferers,” Blumenfeld recalled. “Around six, he would come back, slightly overheated, from lunch, pass through the guard-of-honor of artists, as they rose politely at his entrance, without giving a single one the benefit of a glance. He would never receive more than one (either a man with particularly important connections or a woman with particularly attractive legs).” But by 1937, Blumenfeld had been published in graphic design journals and art and photography magazines.

  The next year, Cecil Beaton, who’d seen Blumenfeld’s portraits, invited him to tea. “The doors to the drawing-room of the world—hitherto barred—seemed to be bursting open,” Blumenfeld would later exult. “Under Cecil’s wing I soon got into the Vogue establishment, and quickly learned to despise that philistine Vanity Fair, in which small-ad profiteers pretend to be arbiters of elegance. Illusions are there to be shattered. In that ants’ nest of unrequited ambition, where nouveautés [novelties] have to be pursued á tout prix [at all costs], I remained—in spite of a thousand pages of published photos—an outsider, a foreign body.” De Brunhoff told him, “If only you’d been born a baron and become homosexual, you’d be the greatest photographer in the world.”

  Despite the heterosexuality that seemed queer in the eyes of fashion, Blumenfeld made his multipage debut in Vogue in October 1938 and appeared in the magazine several more times in succeeding months, culminating with a twenty-page portfolio in May 1939, celebrating the fiftieth birthday of the Eiffel Tower, which included photos of the model Lisa Fonssagrives (the wife of a Brodovitch student) hanging gracefully if precariously off the Parisian landmark.

  American Vogue’s Dr. Agha was underwhelmed by Blumenfeld’s gifts. Agha told him, he wrote to Beaton, “I haven’t a clue about photography.” As an aside, Blumenfeld added, “I could vomit.” Agha apparently felt something similar. In spring 1939, Blumenfeld was informed that Vogue had no further use for him. That June, he sailed to New York, where he had a meeting at the Bazaar with Carmel Snow and came away with an offer to document the Paris collections for her magazine. Rejoicing, he returned to France on August 10, 1939. Nazi Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia that March, and “I still could have fled to America and avoided many abominations, but I had to follow my destiny,” he later wrote.

  World War II broke out a few weeks later, when Germany invaded Poland. As a German, Blumenfeld was subject to arrest after France declared war against Germany, but he arranged a gentle form of house arrest in a hotel. That makeshift arrangement lasted until May 1940, when Germany attacked France, and he was arrested by the French (which was fortunate for him, as Gestapo agents would come to Vogue looking for him on the day the Germans entered Paris) and interned in a succession of French concentration camps. Eventually, “he managed to get out,” says granddaughter Nadia Charbit, reunited with his family, “got visas in Marseilles, and came back to New York in August 1941. Straightaway, he was shooting with Snow, Brodovitch, and Vreeland. He had no studio, so he shared Munkácsi’s for at least two years; they were very good friends.”

  By 1943, he’d made enough money to buy a double-height apartment in the Gainsborough Studios, a live-work apartment house built for well-to-do artists overlooking Central Park. But like Man Ray, Blumenfeld seems not to have taken his fashion work seriously. In his memoirs, he hints at the source of his disillusion when describing his return to the Bazaar. After borrowing money to buy a suit, he presented himself at Carmel Snow’s office, to find her, “shoes off, feet up on her photo-strewn desk, surrounded by arse-licking editors and her arsehole of an art director Brodovitch. . . . Without getting up, without looking up, she delightedly gave me her orders as if we had never been separated by two years of world war. ‘Blumenfeld! Talk of the devil! Two of Huené’s pages are impossible and he’s gone off on holiday again. . . . Run up to the studio right away and do some fabulous retakes . . . a few genuine Blumenfeld pages, sensational masterpieces!’ ” As an aside, she promised they’d have lunch soon so he could tell her his war stories.

  Appalled, he dutifully went to the studio under the building’s roof and shot eight pages, working until midnight before falling asleep in a chair. He woke up to a letter from Snow, “thrust into my hand,” finally expressing delight at his safe return to America before telling him that since he’d worked in the Bazaar studio, using the magazine’s equipment, he would be paid only $150 per picture, not his usual $250. Within a few years, Vogue came calling again and, in 1944, made an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he returned to the fold. But his temperament would eventually bring the curtain down on him there.

  * * *

  I. The manuscript of Frissell’s memoir was shared with the author by her grandson Montgomery Brookfield and his wife, Eileen.

  II. Curiously, Brodovitch didn’t put a photograph on the cover of the Bazaar until 1940, eight years after Agha crossed that Rubicon at Vogue. It was a rare lapse. Even the hidebound William Randolph Hearst had been agitating for photographed covers.

  Chapter 3

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  GAME CHANGERS

  The man who would end Blumenfeld’s career in editorial fashion arrived on American shores almost simultaneously with Blumenfeld in 1941. His name was Alexander Liberman, and though he’d spend the next two decades laboring in Alexey Brodovitch’s shadow, he would eventually emerge and reign for decades as a Medici of fashion photography.

  Like Brodovitch, he was a Russian who’d passed through Paris en route to New York. Like Brodovitch (and Dr. Agha, too), he was immersed in the worlds of avant-garde art and design and a sometime photographer. But Liberman didn’t have the reverence for photography that was the basis of his rival’s power; he thought photos were “a useful method of documentation and nothing more,” according to his authorized biographers. Unlike Brodovitch, Liberman saw himself as an artist—he painted and sculpted in his off-hours—and magazine work as a grubby if lucrative diversion.

  By 1941, Brodovitch had matched and surpassed the innovations Agha had brought to Vogue and challenged its primacy in photography. The Bazaar was full of envelope-pushing location photography—one fashion editor came up with a camel for a 1935 shoot in a tropical greenhouse at the botanical garden in the Bronx, another “scored points [with Carmel Snow] by conjuring up an elephant for a Munkácsi shoot,” Snow’s biographer Penny Rowlands notes. The Bazaar featured equally daring writing and quickly became preeminent, its circulation almost doubling during the worst of the Great Depression. Vogue still sold better, but the cognoscenti preferred the Bazaar, where creativity took precedence over popularity.

  In 1937, William Randolph Hearst, deep in debt, had lost financial—though not editorial—control of his empire, but by divesting his holdings managed to pay off his creditors and regain control by 1943. Condé Nast wasn’t so fortunate. A British press mogul replaced Goldman Sachs in 1934, taking control of the company, though he left the publisher in charge. Vogue and House & Garden struggled and endured, but Vanity Fair failed. Nast’s image of success survived the Depression but was just an illusion. He was dying of a heart condition and, in 1942, was succeeded by a Russian émigré, Iva “Pat” Patcévitch, who’d come to publishing from Wall Street. That turned out to be good news for Alexander Liberman.

  Liberman had been born in St. Petersburg in 1912. His mother came from a family of timber merchants, and his father, though born poor, ran large timber firms, first privately and, after the Russian Revolution, for the Soviet government. The Liberman family’s lifestyle was louche, his mother a flamboyant pleasure-seeker, his father, an insecure, anxious Soviet bureaucrat, say his biographers. Little Alex had behavioral issues that led his father to put him in a London boarding school. His mother later moved to Paris, taking Alex with her and soon taking a lover. Her husband joined her in Paris in 1926 after suffering a nervous breakdown, and both had
extramarital liaisons. Alex developed bleeding ulcers at age seventeen.

  Alex showed his first artistic inclinations by taking, developing, and printing photographs. He briefly studied painting, made a feint at architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, and got a job as a graphic designer in 1932. At twenty-one years old, he made his way into the employ of Lucien Vogel, who’d gone on from a brief partnership with Condé Nast to launch the weekly photojournalism magazine Vu. Vogel, not coincidentally, was Alex’s mother’s latest lover.

  Vu specialized in the documentary photography that had flourished after the introduction of 35 mm cameras and fast film. Liberman worked as its art director with photographic masters such as Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, and André Kertész and created constructivist-style montages of photos for Vu’s cover. He also freelanced, just as Brodovitch had a decade earlier, designing windows and catalogs. Liberman married a German girl, a model, in 1936, the same year Vogel sold his left-leaning magazine to a right-wing businessman; Liberman was promptly promoted to managing editor. But his marriage was troubled and with war approaching, Liberman’s ulcers returned and then he had a nervous breakdown of his own. After a divorce, Alex found himself alone in a house his father had bought on the Côte d’Azur, where, in 1938, he was reintroduced to his mother’s lover’s niece Tatiana, who’d married and become the Comtesse du Plessix. Born well-to-do in St. Petersburg, Tatiana had grown up into an ambitious, artistically inclined young woman-about-Paris, where she counted Man Ray’s mistress, a model turned photographer, Lee Miller among her friends. Her first marriage was crumbling when she embarked on an affair with the younger Liberman. He felt he’d found his soul mate, though a friend from that era described him as “a flirtatious eunuch” and repeated the response of a Vogue editor, Nicolas de Gunzburg, when he was asked if Liberman was homosexual: “He wouldn’t dare.”

  Tatiana’s husband, an aviator, went missing while flying to Gibraltar in 1940, and after that, she and Alex were rarely separated. They fled France through Lisbon, arrived in America in January 1941 with Tatiana’s daughter, who would grow up to be the writer Francine du Plessix Gray, and fell in immediately with a set of wealthy Americans, easing their transition to their new home.

  Within two days, Tatiana found work as a milliner at Henri Bendel. Alex’s notion of becoming a full-time artist had blossomed afresh during his recovery in the south of France, and his father gave him an allowance in his first days in New York, hoping he’d pursue painting. But he realized that to have the sort of luxe life he and Tatiana craved, he’d have to get a job, too, so he reconnected with Lucien Vogel, who was working as a Condé Nast consultant and who introduced him to Patcévitch, then Nast’s assistant, who sent him to Dr. Agha.

  Agha was known in the office as the Terrible Turk, and Liberman was fired after a week at Vogue for failing to meet Agha’s standards. Liberman left, “crushed and desperate,” only to get a phone call summoning him to see Agha’s boss, Nast. Patcévitch had told Nast about Liberman, and when he met the publisher, Liberman recalled, “It became clear very quickly that Nast did not know Agha had already hired and fired me.” Agha was summoned and Liberman was hired—again—at $150 a month. His biographers say he developed a special relationship with the dying Nast. Liberman would often be asked to join Agha and Edna Chase in Nast’s office to choose covers. After Liberman designed one featuring a Horst photograph of a girl in a bathing suit balancing a ball on her bare feet—and put the ball in place of the letter o in Vogue, Crowinshield declared the newcomer to the art department a genius. Cultivating his superiors would be Liberman’s modus operandi throughout his professional life. He was expert, his stepdaughter would later write, at “playing all the right cards, charming all the right people.” In summer 1942, he and Tatiana would share a country house with Nast’s heir apparent, Patcévitch, and his wife.

  Liberman’s rise presaged Dr. Agha’s fall. Shortly after Nast died, the Terrible Turk informed Patcévitch that he wouldn’t work with Liberman. In February 1943, Agha’s resignation was announced, and a month later Liberman’s name appeared on Vogue’s masthead as its art director. “I was cheaper, probably,” Liberman said.

  Liberman made the most of the absence of French fashion from the wartime market, emphasizing practical clothes worn by sporty, all-American models (who were the only ones available). He also introduced younger photographers. One of his first “discoveries” was Frances McLaughlin, who would replace Toni Frissell as Vogue’s resident female photographer in 1943—and was the first woman to win a Vogue contract; ironically, she was introduced to Liberman by Frissell. Despite Liberman’s considering her “more imaginative and refined” than Frissell, her relative importance is indicated by her absence from On the Edge, the book of photographs Vogue published on its one hundredth anniversary.

  Liberman had met Alexey Brodovitch in his first days in New York, but as he had with Agha, made a bad first impression. Brodovitch asked him for a sample page, which Liberman produced and the elder Russian rejected. They never spoke again. But Liberman was aware of his rival’s preeminence and of the need to differentiate himself. “Elegance was Brodovitch’s strong point,” Liberman later observed, “the page looked very attractive. But in a way, it seemed to me that Brodovitch was serving the same purpose that Agha had served, which was to make the page attractive to women—not interesting to women. . . . I thought there was more merit in being able to put twenty pictures on two pages than in making two elegant pages.”

  Yet, it was a onetime Brodovitch protégé, Irving Penn, whose hiring would come to be seen as “one of Alex’s finest achievements.” New Jersey–born Penn enrolled in the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia in 1934 and, in his first year there, was an indifferent student. But at nineteen, he met Brodovitch and joined his Design Laboratory. Penn took unpaid summer jobs as Brodovitch’s assistant in 1937 and 1938, opening the great man’s mail, but also creating a drawing that Snow ran in the Bazaar, Penn’s first published work. Though he was not yet a photographer and likely hadn’t even thought of becoming one, Penn would later remark, “Brodovitch was the first person to show me the mystical quality of photographs.”

  The art director noted Penn’s diligence: “At eleven o’clock at night you sent the material to the engravers and you never saw the proofs until next morning. But Penn would stay quite often and go to the engravers, then the printer, to check. He had a wonderful background and experience for this kind of cooking.” With the proceeds of $5 sales of sketches of shoes to the Bazaar, Penn bought his first camera, a Rolleiflex, and began wandering the streets of New York “taking camera notes.” Brodovitch and Snow published some of them. Penn’s photos of storefronts, signs, and street scenes have an innocent charm.

  In 1939, Brodovitch started moonlighting as the art director at Saks Fifth Avenue and, in 1940, again hired Penn as his assistant. A year later, Brodovitch left and Penn replaced him. But Penn, a gentle, quiet, fastidious man, hated working with merchants and wanted to see other cultures, and to try to create something more than store logos and shopping bags. Looking for someone who might replace him at Saks so he could travel, he heard about Liberman from Brodovitch, met him, but decided he was “much too evolved for the job.” Penn shortly left for Mexico to try again to be a painter and on his return in 1943 was hired by Liberman as his assistant at Vogue, beginning a decades-long association. “So close has their working relationship been that it is often impossible to disentangle their individual contributions to shared creative problems,” the photography curator John Szarkowski wrote while both were still alive.

  One of Penn’s jobs was to dream up covers for Vogue to be executed by its team of photographers—Horst, Beaton, John Rawlings, and the newly arrived Blumenfeld—but “they just gave me the back of the hand,” Penn recalled. He felt he’d failed until Liberman suggested another route to the same destination—that he take the photos himself—and provided an assistant to teach him to use Vogue’s eight-by-ten studio cameras. Penn’
s first cover, also the first photographic still life in the magazine’s history, appeared in fall 1943. Liberman’s judgment was vindicated by Penn’s clear, precise images, and over Edna Chase’s stubborn objections, the pair continued making pictures—some of them likely sketched first by Liberman, who would often guide photographers in that way.

  Penn left Vogue and America to join the war effort in 1944 and returned in 1946. By then, Avedon, Penn’s future rival, stylistic opposite, and the only other photographer to achieve the same eminence and win equal, near-universal regard, had begun to make his mark at Harper’s Bazaar. Both Irving Penn and Richard Avedon would be game changers, taking fashion photography into the modern era, dominating the field for decades, and setting the highest standard for all who followed.

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  LIBERATION

  In August 1944, Paris was liberated. That December, Carmel Snow arrived, met up with Henri Cartier-Bresson, a young disciple of Martin Munkácsi’s, and they traveled across France together. Cartier-Bresson’s photos ran in the Bazaar the next spring accompanied by a text by Janet Flanner. Back in Paris, Snow reconnected with its fashion set, then, arriving home, “embarked almost at once on a new love affair,” she later wrote, “another magazine.” Based on a section of the Bazaar inaugurated in 1943, featuring fashions for young women, Junior Bazaar magazine was launched just after the competing Seventeen first appeared in 1944. Decades before the debut of Teen Vogue, Snow reveled in the chance to cover “a confused world of novices in ballet slippers and wide hair ribbons. . . . Junior Bazaar also brought me my last great ‘discovery.’ ” That was Richard Avedon.