ALEXEY BRODOVITCH AND HIS INFLUENCE
Richard Avedon [Photographer]
Richard Avedon [Photographer]: ALEXEY BRODOVITCH AND HIS INFLUENCE. Cleveland: Cleveland Institute of Art, 1973. Original edition. Poster machine folded in sixths for mailing [as issued]. Printed in color on recto and black to verso on a lightweight sheet. Expected wear to the heavily inked folds. The chosen paper stock combined with heavily applied metallic copper ink highlights the minor handling wear. Inked name to mailing panel, still a very good example of this rare poster.
17 x 24-inch (43 x 61 cm) poster reprinting Richard Avedon’s portrait of his mentor Alexey Brodovitch for the exhibition at the Cleveland Institute of Art from September 30 to October 26, 1973.
In 1933, Brodovitch added the Design Laboratory to the classes he offered at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art. It was meant to be a workshop for his advanced students who wanted to experiment with all aspects of design. Brodovitch shared the Bauhaus belief that you needed to educate the whole individual by directing his or her attention to a variety of modern solutions in their graphic projects. His course description for the Design Laboratory read:
The aim of the course is to help the student to discover his individuality, crystallize his taste, and develop his feeling for the contemporary trend by stimulating his sense of invention and perfecting his technical ability. The course is conducted as an experimental laboratory, inspired by the ever-changing tempo of life, discovery of new techniques, new fields of operation ... in close contact with current problems of leading magazines, department stores, advertising agencies and manufactures. Subjects include design, layout, type, poster, reportage, illustration, magazine make-up, package and product design, display, styling, art directing.
The lab was split into two sections per week, one for design and one for photography. The workshops were immensely popular, and it was not unusual for more than sixty people to show up to his class on the first night. Among the photographers who attended his classes were Diane Arbus, Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Hiro, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand and Tony Ray-Jones.
Alexey Brodovitch (1898 – 1971) is a legend in graphic design: during his 25-year tenure as art director of Harper's Bazaar, he exerted tremendous influence on the direction of design and photography. A passionate teacher of graphic design, advocate of photography and collaborator with many prominent photographers, Brodovitch is often credited with having a major influence on the acceptance of European modernism in America. His use of assymetrical layouts, white space, and dynamic imagery changed the nature of magazine design. He was responsible for exposing everyday Americans to avant-garde artists by commissioning work from cutting-edge artists such as Cassandre, Dali, Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, etc.
Brodovitch played a crucial role in introducing into the United States a radically simplified, "modern" graphic design style forged in Europe in the 1920s from an amalgam of vanguard movements in art and design. Through his teaching, he created a generation of designers sympathetic to his belief in the primacy of visual freshness and immediacy. Fascinated with photography, he made it the backbone of modern magazine design, and he fostered the development of an expressionistic, almost primal style of picture-taking that became the dominant style of photographic practice in the 1950s.
He came to the United States in 1930 to start a department of advertising (later known as the Philadelphia College of Art). There he trained students in the fundamentals of European design, while embarking on numerous freelance illustration assignments in Philadelphia and New York. In 1934 Carmel Snow, the new editor of Harper's Bazaar, saw his design work and immediately hired him to be its art director. It was the beginning of a collaboration that was to revolutionize both fashion and magazine design, and that catapulted Bazaar past its arch-rival, Vogue.
Throughout his career, he continued to teach. His "Design Laboratory," which focused variously on illustration, graphic design and photography and provided a system of rigorous critiques for those who aspired to magazine work. As a teacher, Brodovitch was inspiring, though sometimes harsh and unrelenting. A student's worst offense was to present something Brodovitch found boring; at best, the hawk-faced Russian would pronounce a work "interesting." Despite his unbending manner and lack of explicit critical standards -- Brodovitch did not formulate a theory of design --many students under his tutelage discovered untapped creative reserves.