Alexander Liberman Andromeda, 1981 Red painted steel, unique 31 by 61 by 17 in. 78.7 by 154.9 by 43.2 cm As the Editorial Director of all Conde Nast publications, including “Vogue”, Alexander Liberman commissioned artists such as George Braque, Mark Chagall, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg to work on projects for the magazine. Inspired by these artists, Liberman began creating works and exhibiting in galleries and museums around New York by the 1950’s. The beauty of his works lies in their simplicity; his paintings are geometric in pattern with a heavy use of primary colors and his sculptures, boldly painted assembles from industrial material. Not only are his paintings and sculptures in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, but his public sculptures can be seen in over 40 cities around the world. In Greek mythology, Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, who was sacrified to the sea monster, Cetus, after Casiopeia boasted that Andromeda was more beauitful than the Nereids. In the end, Andromeda was saved from death by the hero Perseus, but the imagery of the “Princess and Dragon“ motif still exists today when referring to the tale. In Liberman’s sculpture, he takes a very abstract approach to creating “Andromeda“. The figures are not only flattened but so intertwined that one can only make out the tenticles of the sea monster. The single color of cadmium red, symbolic of beauty in his home town of Russia, unifies the work as a whole while further blurring the lines between human and monster.
