Alexey Brodovitch

            Alexey Brodovitch was Russian born, to a wealthy and aristocratic family.   When he was just seven years old his father's work as a physician took the family to Japan where Alexey was given a camera and began his visual education.   In 1914, he joined the Czar's White Army and was stationed in Rumania, where he was wounded and removed to a hospital for a long recovery.   In 1920, Alexey and his family fled to Europe.  Soon Alexey Brodovitch was designing sets for the Ballet Russe with a fellow Russian, Diaghilev, whose approach to dance and the integration of dance, music and scene design exerted a strong influence on Brodovitch. .
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             The 1920s were exciting years to be in Paris where    Picasso, Derain, and Matisse were also working at the time.  Brodovitch worked in many artistic areas; designing porcelain, glass, textiles and layouts for famous designers.  In 1924, Alexey arrived on the Paris art scene with a bang when he won the coveted prize in a poster competition for Le Bal Banal, a benefit dance for poor artists.    He beat out Picasso, among others for the honor.    Over the next five years the clients he designed for included Martini Vermouth, department stores, and a seafood restaurant.   These years launched Alexey's career  in art. Paris was immersed in modernism, and it suited Alexy. Although Art Deco was prominant at the time, he resisted the ornamental, seeming to know that the industrial age required a new kind of design.
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             Brodovitch came to the United States in 1930 to start a department of advertising (later known as the Philadelphia College of Art). There he trained students in the fundamentals of European design, while embarking on numerous freelance illustration assignments in Philadelphia and New York. In 1934 Carmel Snow, the new editor of Harper's Bazaar, saw his design work and immediately hired him to be its art director. It was the beginning of a collaboration that was to revolutionize both fashion and magazine design, and that catapulted Bazaar past its arch-rival, Vogue.