Liberman was born into a
Jewish family in
Kyiv. When his father took a post advising the
Soviet government, the family moved to Moscow. Life there became difficult, and his father secured permission from
Lenin and the
Politburo to take his son to London in 1921. Young Liberman was educated in Ukraine, England, and France, where he took up life as a "
White émigré" in Paris. He began his publishing career in Paris in 1933–1936 with the early pictorial magazine
Vu, where he worked under
Lucien Vogel as art director, then managing editor, working with photographers such as
Brassaï,
André Kertész, and
Robert Capa. After emigrating to
New York in 1941, he began working for
Condé Nast Publications, rising to the position of editorial director, which he held from 1962 to 1994. Only in the 1950s did Liberman take up painting and, later, metal sculpture. His highly recognizable sculptures are assembled from industrial objects (segments of steel I-beams, pipes, drums, and such), often painted in uniform bright colors. In a 1986 interview concerning his formative years as a sculptor and his aesthetic, Liberman said, "I think many works of art are screams, and I identify with screams." His massive work
The Way, a x x structure, is made of eighteen salvaged steel oil tanks, and became a signature piece of
Laumeier Sculpture Park, and a major landmark of
St. Louis, Missouri. Before finding success in painting and sculpture, Liberman was a photographer. Beginning in 1948, he spent his summers visiting and photographing a generation of modern European artists working in their studios including
Georges Braque,
Henri Matisse,
Maurice Utrillo,
Marc Chagall,
Marcel Duchamp,
Constantin Brancusi, and
Pablo Picasso. In 1959 the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City exhibited Liberman's photographs of artists and their studios. A year later the images were collected in Liberman's first book,
The Artist in his Studio published by
Viking Press (Kazanjian and Tomkins, 1993). He was married briefly to Hildegarde Sturm (August 25, 1936), a
model and competitive
skier. His second wife (since 1942), Tatiana Yacovleff du Plessix Liberman (1906–1991), had been a childhood playmate and baby sitter. In 1941, they escaped together from occupied France, via Lisbon, to New York. She had operated a hat salon in Paris, then designed hats for
Henri Bendel in
Manhattan. She continued in
millinery at
Saks Fifth Avenue where she was billed as "Tatiana du Plessix" or "Tatiana of Saks", until the mid-1950s. In 1992, he married Melinda Pechangco, a nurse who had cared for Tatiana during an early illness. His stepdaughter,
Francine du Plessix Gray, was a noted author. ==Career==