Brodovitch as instructor
[edit]A new approach to teaching
While still living in Paris, Brodovitch was offered a job by John Story Jenks, the father of a young girl Brodovitch had shown around the arts scene in Paris. Jenks, a trustee of the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (currently the University of the Arts), was overwhelmed by Brodovitch's talents and asked him to head the school's Advertising Design Department. In September 1930, Brodovitch moved to Philadelphia with his wife and son to take the job. Brodovitch began teaching advertising design, creating a special department devoted to the subject.[3]
Brodovitch's task was to bring American advertising design up to the level of Europe's, which was thought to have a far more modern spirit.[21] Before his arrival, advertising students were simply copying the magazine styles of N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle. The illustrations were beautiful, but had evolved from the tradition of 19th-century romantic realism, a thing of the past.[22] Brodovitch's teaching technique, on the other hand, was unlike any other the students had been exposed to. He would always teach with a visual aid. Brodovitch would bring into class French and German magazines to examine the pages with his students, explaining the artist's work or technique. He would raise questions like, "Could this line be better? Could it be like, for example, Cocteau?"[23] When not in the classroom, Brodovitch would take the class on outings around Philadelphia to see factories, laboratories, shopping centers, housing projects, dumps, and the zoo. The students were then told to make a "graphic impression" of what they had seen, whether a photographic interpretation, a drawing, or an abstraction. Brodovitch did not teach in the conventional sense, but rather compelled his students to discover one's inner, creative resources.[19]
[edit]Design laboratory
In 1933, Brodovitch added the Design Laboratory to the classes he offered. 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.[24] 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.[25]
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, Lisette Model, and Garry Winogrand.[26]
[edit]Students on Brodovitch
"He taught me to be intolerant of mediocrity. He taught me to worship the unknown." - Art Kane, fashion and music photographer[27]
"I learned from him that if, when you look in your camera, you see an image you have ever seen before, don't click the shutter." - Hiro, fashion photographer[28]
Notable students
Graduates of these early courses went on to prominent careers in the field. Brodovitch's department came to be known as a 'prep school' for agencies and magazines around the country.
Richard Avedon
Lillian Bassman
Paul Himmel
Hiro
Roy Faulconer
Mary Fullerton, assistant to Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar and art director of Mademoiselle
Stewart Graves
Joseph Gering, Brides
Robert Greenwell, art director of RCA Records
Nelson Gruppo, art director at Stage, Promenade, and This Week
Joe Jones, House Beautiful
Elizabeth Lovett
Allan Porter, editor in chief Camera magazine
Alfred Lowrey, art director at Good Housekeeping, American Weekly, and Newsweek
Ed Schartzer, with N. W. Ayer and Son
David Steck, Life Magazine
Victor Trasoff, art director of CBS
Irving Penn Vogue Magazine
Ted Croner
Harper's Bazaar
In spring of 1934, the Art Directors Club of New York asked Brodovitch to design their "13th Annual Art Directors Exhibition" at the Rockefeller Center, New York.[30] It was there that Carmel Snow, the recently appointed editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar, saw Brodovitch's work for the first time. She knew right away that Brodovitch would be the one to transform the magazine into a real revival of Vogue, where she had started her career.[31]
I saw a fresh, new conception of layout technique that struck me like a revelation: pages that "bled" beautifully cropped photographs, typography and design that were bold and arresting. Within ten minutes I had asked Brodovitch to have cocktails with me, and that evening I signed him to a provisional contract as art director.[32]
The offer was, of course, dependent on the approval of the owner of Harper's Bazaar, William Randolph Hearst. Brodovitch eagerly returned to Philadelphia and assigned his students apprenticing at his Van Pelt Street studio to make two dummy issues of the magazine. He insisted that each page have a "shock value" of its own to set the magazine apart, "cutting paper dolls out of patterned paper, or illustration perfume bottles to look like high key photography - whatever was unlike other fashion magazines was tried."[33] Although preferring more conservative design, Hearst put his trust in Carmel Snow and allowed her to take on Brodovitch as art director where he remained for 24 years.
The new look of Harper's Bazaar emphasized culture for its own sake. Taking advantage of Brodovitch's contacts in Europe and his wide knowledge of photography, the magazine introduced the work of may artists and photographers to its American audience. Before starting at Harper's Bazaar, Brodovitch organized a return trip to France, hoping to convince old friends to work with him at the magazine. Each summer he would return to offer commissions to artists and photographers until 1939 when the start of World War II made it impossible. By continually bringing in creative forces from overseas, he kept the magazine permanently fresh and cutting-edge. Among the artists that worked for Bazaar were Jean Cocteau, Raoul Dufy, Leonor Fini, Marc Chagall, Man Ray and A. M. Cassandre, the most eminent poster artist in France at the time, replacing the former cover favorite, Erté.[34][35]
The style of Harper's
To those who worked with him at Azar, the pinnacle of Brodovitch's career as a designer was the unfailing elegance of his pages. This elegance, combined with an element of innovation was the ideal mix for a fashion magazine. The quality that guaranteed his success was his devotion to the new, unending surprise and vitality.[36] Frances MacFadden, Bazaar's managing editor for much of Brodovitch's tenure, explained his working method:
It was a pleasure to watch him work. He was so swift and sure. In emergencies, like the time the Clipper bearing the report of the Paris Collections was held up in Bermuda, his speed was dazzling. A quick splash or two on the cutting board, a minute's juggling of the photostats, a slather of art gum, and the sixteen pages were complete. His layouts, of course, were the despair of copywriters whose cherished tone poems on girdles or minks had to be sacrificed to his sacred white space. Just before we went to press, all the layouts were laid out in sequence on Carmel Snow's floor, and there, under his eye, re-arranged until the rhythm of the magazine suited him.[37]
Typically, Brodovitch would begin his layouts by designing the layouts as illustrations by hand. His assistant would receive these sketches to look over, but the photographers and freelance writers were often given little or no direction at all besides to come up with something new and unusual. When the photographs for the issue arrived, he would pick the most visually interesting and have a variety of sizes of reproductions made on a photostat machine. From these, each spread would be made one at a time, then arranged among the others to create a well-paced magazine.
His style for the magazine was radically different than any of its contemporaries. Brodovitch wanted his spreads to be innovative and fresh. While other fashion magazines thought it important to show the whole garment, Brodovitch would crop images unexpectedly or off-center to bring a new dynamism to the layout. He used forms in the photographs or illustrations as a cue for how to handle the shape of the text. In his earlier layouts, he would arrange photographs like playing cards, splayed out on the page or in the shape of a fan. Later in his career, however, he abandoned this technique in favor of using only one or two images to a page. Surrealism found its way onto the pages of the magazines in various experimental forms. For example, Brodovitch once used fashion photographs sent via radio from Paris to New York in blurry forms to communicate this new way of sharing information. Designs also included torn edges on photographs, or pages made to look as they had been torn through with a woman's figure stepping out of them. The motif of isolated body parts, another common Surrealist theme, could be seen on the covers and spreads of Harper's in the form of lips, hands, and eyes.
Brodovitch was sensitive to the fact that color was relatively new in magazines, with laborious preparation and high costs. By using process or second color inventively, Brodovitch was able to give the magazine an added sense of currency and luxury. He applied color to his layouts expressively, often choosing to use colors bolder than might be seen in the real world. Even after full-color reproduction became standard practice, he still used broad swaths of single colors for bold emphasis.
In terms of photography, Brodovitch had a distinct feel for what the magazine needed. He favored on-location fashion photography as opposed to the studio shots normally used in other fashion publications. He urged his photographers to look for jarring juxtapositions in their images. One such spread features a woman in a full-length Dior gown posed between two circus elephants. The cinematic effect, a trademark characteristic of his layouts, involved using photographs as if they were stills from a film. He would repeat a pose or a dress several times across a spread to give a narrative, temporal feeling. At times, Brodovitch would arbitrarily take a series of photographs and adopt a story line to go with them, as though recapping a movie. He was known to push this idea even further by adding film sprocket borders to photographs at times. Brodovitch also often emphasized spatial illusions, using type and photographs to create multiple perspectives within a space. The notion of mirroring and doubling also interested him, as can be seen in how he paired similar pictures on a spread or dividing halves of one image across the gutter of the page.
With this goal of story-telling, Harper's Bazaar can be seen as an example of a mediascape, in that Brodovitch was trying to construct a reality for the imaginations of the readers. He would create versions of small movie stills or spreads in which woman were supposed to see themselves rather than the model. For example, he would often use a model's silhouette rather than her whole form, or keep her face in shadow, so that any reader could place themselves in those fashions, leading a charmed life. The result would be a magazine of images "out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives."
