Brodovitch Before Bazaar

Abstract

Alexey Brodovitch is a figure not well known outside the field of graphic design. Remembered best for his generation-long tenure at the fashion journal Harper’s Bazaar, he helped usher in a new aesthetic to the world of American magazine design. But who he was outside that narrow frame, and how he rose to such success, has been largely relegated to the margins of design history. The significance of his influence on photography and design education, loudly trumpeted by industry leaders of the generation succeeding him, has since gone quiet. This dissertation explores the period of Brodovitch’s life and career least explored in historical texts and underrepresented in archives of graphic design history — Brodovitch before Bazaar. This encompasses, specifically, his rise to prominence in Paris during the 1920s; his revitalization of the Advertising Design program at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Arts (PMSIA) between 1930 and 1938; and the earliest period of his critically acclaimed work as a freelance artist, designer, and curator in Philadelphia and New York. In finer detail, it examines how Brodovitch’s Paris work — and Brodovitch himself — came to embody the phenomenon of cross-cultural influence and positioned him as an optimal “transmitter” of European Modernism to the U.S. during the interwar era. It also analyzes Brodovitch’s teaching philosophy and classroom pedagogy, particularly his use of photography and the body of work leading to his only solo publication, Ballet (1945).