Alexey Brodovitch

Alexey Vyacheslavovich Brodovitch was born in 1898 in Ogolichi, then part of the Russian Empire. He served in the Imperial Russian Army during the First World War and the subsequent civil war, fought on the White side, and eventually made his way out of Russia via Constantinople to Paris.

In Paris through the 1920s he moved through the graphic arts — painting sets for the Ballets Russes, designing posters, and winning a poster competition for the Bal Banal in 1924 in which Picasso also entered. He ran the studio at the Parisian department store Trois Quartiers and absorbed the European avant-garde around him — Cassandre’s posters, the Bauhaus émigrés, the Constructivists he already knew from home.

In 1930 he moved to Philadelphia to run the advertising-design programme at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art. In 1934 Carmel Snow hired him as art director of Harper’s Bazaar. He held the post until 1958 — twenty-four years that remade American magazine design.

From 1941 he ran the Design Laboratory, first at the New School for Social Research and then independently. It was never a conventional course. Students brought work; Brodovitch tore it up. Those who survived included Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, Hiro and Art Kane.

His later years were difficult. Ill health, alcoholism and two studio fires that destroyed most of his personal archive pushed him into retreat. He returned to France in the mid-1960s and died in Le Thor in 1971, largely in obscurity.

Brodovitch’s position was that the editorial spread — not the single page — is the unit of design, and that typography and photography have to be composed as a single image.

“Astonish me!” — Alexey Brodovitch, to students and contributors

The two-word brief became legendary because it was genuine. He refused to tell photographers what he wanted. He expected them to bring him something he hadn’t seen before, and he edited ruthlessly when they didn’t.

His working principle was that white space is the designer’s best friend. A Brodovitch spread is never full. Type sits against deliberately empty paper. An image bleeds across the gutter so that the fold itself becomes part of the composition. Type is treated photographically — its weight and placement answering the weight and placement of the image across the spread.

He was not a theorist. He left no textbook, no manifesto, almost no writing. What he left was the practice and the students who carried it.