Brodovitch Before Bazaar A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Curtis A. Lund IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Barbara Martinson Dr. Brad Hokanson June 2020 © 2020 Curtis A. Lund Images in this dissertation are used in accordance with the College Art Association’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts (2015). Additional permissions, where required, are acknowledged in the Illustrations section. Quotations from Arnold Newman are used with permission from David Newman, Arnold Newman Studios. AcknowLedgments This project could not have happened without the kindness, generosity, and support of many, many people. First, I want to thank my committee members and extended Gopher family: • Barbara Martinson, your mentorship put me on the right path, in so many ways, and I’ll be forever grateful; • Brad Hokanson, for tangoing in to save the day, and for your support and guidance in this last stretch; • Jenn Marshall, for welcoming a stranger from that other campus, for your brilliant writing which has been a guidepost, and for generously sharing your time and talents all along the way; • James Boyd Brent, for your patience (and for talking me down) the first time through, and for helping keep my eye on the art in design; • Lyn Bruin, for teaching me to be a more careful listener, and for modeling that rigor and kindness can go hand-in-hand in the classroom; • Char Klarquist, the best ally and advocate a grad student could ever have asked for; • Marilyn DeLong, for introducing me to the world of material culture studies and showing me that everything I was interested in studying had a name and a home; • Liz Goebel and Hyunjoo Im, for your guidance in getting across the finish line; • and all the faculty in the Department of Design, Housing and Apparel, especially the Graphic Design track, from whom and with whom I’ve learned so much. The seeds of this project were planted in 2013–2015, with the preparation and installation of Alexey Brodovitch: Art Director at the Goldstein Museum of Design in St. Paul, MN. Huge thanks to Ron Ott, co-curator and researcher and photographer extraordinaire; and to the GMD staff who worked diligently to make our exhibition a success: Jean McElvain, Eunice Haugen, Mary Alice Chaney, Emily Marti, Kathleen Campbell, and Lin Nelson-Mayson. Thanks also to the sponsors and funders of the GMD’s Jerome Joss Research Internship. Thanks to Marlys McGuire and Amy Gmur, who were instrumental in the 2015 exhibition and in my continuing research. Thanks also to Rachel Cagle and Emilia Kaczynski for their support in translating source materials. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to have participated in the UMN Writing Center’s 2018 Dissertation Writing Retreat. Many thanks to Katie Levin, the whole Writing Center crew, and my fellow summer writer-retreaters for the accountability and camaraderie. An early version of Chapter Two was first presented at “Design and Displacement,” the 2018 international conference of the Design History Society. Many thanks to the organizers of the conference, my co-panelists and moderator, and the attendees. i Even in this era of Digital Humanities initiatives and growing digitization of archival materials, this study still involved a whole lot of old-fashioned digging. My unending gratitude goes out to the many archivists, librarians, and curators who so often and so generously went out of their way to help me navigate the unnavigable, access the inaccessible, and come to know many of these artifacts up close: at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: archivist Susie Anderson Laquer, who introduced me to William Campbell and knocked down the first domino to set all this in motion; Morgan Little, Registrar of Collections and unearther of treasures and finder of abandoned lens caps; Miriam Cady and the staff of the PMA library and archives; and Kathy Hiesinger, who was as kind a host as she is legendary a curator; at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia: Phoebe Kowalewski, Laura Grutzeck, and especially Sara MacDonald, unfailingly generous and all-knowing; Steve Galbraith, Curator of the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Professor R. Roger Remington, and library special collections staff at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY; Wendy Scheir of the New School Archives and Special Collections, New York City; Emily Una Weirich of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ; Paul Galloway, Architecture & Design Collection Specialist at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; at the New York Public Library: Cara Dellatte, reference archivist; proxy researcher Brice Corder; and the generous staff of the NYPL Manuscripts and Archives division and the Library for the Performing Arts Special Collections division; Ann Mosher of the Temple University Special Collections Research Center, Philadelphia; Weckea Dejura Lilly of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Susannah Carroll of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia; Nicole Westerdahl and Deborah Bauder of the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse, NY; Nathaniel Parks of the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago; Sylvie Pitoiset of the Bibliothèque Forney, Paris; Karyn Hinkle of the Northwestern University Libraries, Evanston, IL; ii Katie LaBarbera of the Saint Louis Public Libraries, St Louis, MO; Vallie Pettersen, president of Paasche Airbrush Co., Kenosha, WI; and the ReclameArsenaal Foundation of Laren, the Netherlands, hosts of the International Advertising and Design DataBase. Special thanks to the marvelous community of scholars — fellow faculty, staff, and students — at Hamline University; to my generous and supportive co-workers and artists at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, for their encouragement and flexibility throughout my graduate studies; and to all the friends and family and DHA and ArtH classmates who have supported me along the way with their humor, gentle prodding, and sympathetic procrastination. Thanks to my husband, Benjamin Imker, for allowing Brodovitch such a large presence in our household — mentally and in wall and shelf space — for so many years, and for not immediately divorcing me after I turned our honeymoon itinerary into a string of site visits and research interviews and a conference. At least we found the sparkling water dispenser. Three cheers for “design grandpa”! iii Dedication Ad astra, per alia porci. iv 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, 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 Modernist design 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 publication, Ballet (1945). v TabLe of Contents List of Figures vii Chapter 1 1 Brodovitch Before Bazaar: Background, Methodology, and Corrective Historiography Chapter 2 52 “U.S. Picks Russian to Teach French Commercial Art”: Tracing Cross-Cultural Exchange in Brodovitch’s Interwar Graphic Design Chapter 3 107 Brodovitch’s Laboratory: Teaching, Making, Experimenting, Breaking Rules Illustrations 170 Bibliography 192 Appendix: Concluding Statement 206 vi List of Figures Figure 1 Alexey Brodovitch, La Rotonde, c.1930 p. 11 Figure 2 Alexey Brodovitch, Bal Banal, 1924 13 Figure 3 Alexey Brodovitch, Le Cercle business card, c.1928 14 Figure 4 Alexey Brodovitch, Le joueur de flûte, 1922 18 Figure 5 Alexey Brodovitch, untitled icon painting, 1922 19 Figure 6 Interior of Restaurant Prunier, 2019 27 Figure 7 Alexey Brodovitch, Prunier signage plaque, 1924 27 Figure 8 Alexey Brodovitch, Prunier menu cover, 1924 / 2019 27 Figure 9 Alexey Brodovitch, Composition aux poissons, 1924 28 Figure 10 Pavilion Pomone, 1925 29 Figure 11 Becker Fils boutique, 1925 31 Figure 12 Alexey Brodovitch, catalogs for Donnet, c.1928 33 Figure 13 Alexey Brodovitch, La trapeziste, 1928 34 Figure 14 Alexey Brodovitch, engraved galalith print, 1928 34 Figure 15 Alexey Brodovitch, untitled design, c.1930 34 Figure 16 Alexey Brodovitch, untitled design, 1929 34 Figure 17 Advertisement in Advertising Arts, 1934 34 Figures 18–19 Alexey Brodovitch, illustrations from Monsieur de Bougrelon, 1928 34 Figure 20 Façade of Aux Trois Quartiers, c.1929 35 Figure 21 Alexey Brodovitch, catalog