Alexander Liberman

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Olympic Iliad, a Liberman sculpture at the Seattle Center in Seattle, Washington.

Alexander Liberman (1912-1999) was a Russian-American publisher, painter, and sculptor. Born in Kiev, he was educated in Paris, where he began his publishing career with the early pictorial magazine Vu. After emigrating to New York in 1941, he began working for Conde Nast Publications, rising to the position of Editorial Director, which he held from 1962-1994.

It was only in the 1950s that Liberman took up painting and, later, metal sculpture. His highly recognizeable sculptures are assembled from industrial objects (segments of steel I-beams, pipes, drums, etc.,) often painted in uniform bright colors. Prominent examples are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Storm King Art Center, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Tate Gallery, and the Guggenheim Museum.