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Alexander Liberman at Ameringer & Yohe

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Jonathan Gilmore

While studying architecture and working as a set designer in Paris in the 1930s, Alexander Liberman (1912-2000), who was born in Kiev, joined the staff of Vu, one of the earliest magazines to incorporate photographs. There he began a multipart career: as editor and designer, photographer and painter. After moving to New York, he was appointed editorial director of Conde Nast--a post he held for over 30 years. Liberman was deeply influenced by currents in modernist art in both his own work as a painter and sculptor and in his commercial production.

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Liberman played an important role in introducing avant-garde art to mass audiences, commissioning Dali, Duchamp, Johns and Rauschenberg, among others, in projects for Vogue and, in a more uncertain legacy, pioneering the use of contemporary art in fashion shoots. Notions of high and low culture colored his critical reception as an artist, the insinuation being that his day job must somehow contaminate his art. Upon seeing his paintings, Diana Vreeland exclaimed, "Oh Alex, they'd make such beautiful sweaters!"

This show re-created a 1960 exhibition at Betty Parsons of 15 of Liberman's paintings of circles, a motif on which he had concentrated almost exclusively for the prior decade. In early works, he mainly employed the circle geometrically, as figure against ground or as shape-defining negative space. In Diptych--Two Ways (1950), a large (60 by 74 1/4 inches) enamel on masonite, two tall rectangles of equal size are butted together. On the left, a red circle sits on a white ground, while on the right, the colors are reversed. Centered vertically, with space above and below, the circles touch the outside edges and brush up against each other in the middle, appearing to conduct some sort of exchange. Here, as in many similarly composed paintings, circles are endowed with both vaguely transcendental intimations and a snappy, mid-century-modern design esthetic.

Painted in enamel, in some cases on aluminum, these works have an industrial feel (Liberman acknowledged this to Thomas Hess in 1974, comparing his whites to the coating of refrigerators). That and his hard-edge renderings have suggested a minimalist sensibility avant la lettre. But Liberman's ambitions were largely pictorial and formalist, as he placed one element next to another in a flat, open field. There is also a hint of optical afterimage effects.

Liberman exploits the universality of the circle to endow his purely abstract configurations with suggestions of the actual world. An untitled oil on canvas of 1959 shows just two black circles containing a few red and blue dots, but we can also see them as organisms in petri dishes or the distant view through binoculars. Likewise, in three oils on canvas, each titled Yellow Continuum (all 1958-59), we find the pared-down configuration of a single large yellow circle and one or more small blue and black ones marshaled to disparate associations: a flat turntablelike disk, the pupil of an eye or planets in orbit around a sun.--Jonathan Gilmore

Alexander Liberman at Ameringer & Yohe

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Jonathan Gilmore

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