Alexander Liberman is known as a prolific painter, sculptor,draftsman, paintmaker, and photographer, but his art has never been looked at from a perspective that would permit an understanding of its essential wholeness, intergrity, and interrelatedness. Liberman's contribution is hard to assess because he is difficult to pin down - a whirling dervish in perpetual motion, the state of those who fear the gods may catch up with them. But flight from the past into an unknown future has been the story of Liberman's life. Throughout his career as an artist, Liberman has been attracted to the epic and to the radical - a combination sometimes found in baroque art, but rarely, except perhaps in the art of Picasso, Matisse, Leger, and the greatest of the Abstract Expressionists, in modern art.

 Liberman's impulse to create epic and mounmental art, coupled with his urge to experiment with new media and techniques, are explicable if we know the facts of his life. Like his life, his art has often been based on violent rupture. nevertheless, one discerns threads of continuity: a dedication to the goals of high art as well as to stretching the limits of the possible and the practical; a need to deny reality, the better to transcend it; an attraction to technical innovation coupled with a disdain for technique for its own sake; a preoccupation with the symbolic content of abstract art and the capatity of art to communicate.

 The peculiar cirumstances of Liberman's life as a refugee first from Lenin's Russia and then from Nazi-occupied France irrevocably affected the course of his art. His connections to Europe remain profound. He spends every summer in Italy and France, as he did in his youth before the War swept away the civilization and culture that formed him. Because both his parents were revolutionaries - his father in politics, his mother in aesthetics - Liberman was prepared for the radicalism of the New York School. However, his development as a major artist of that school was slowed by his experiences as a refuee who arrived at the same time as the Surrealists, but who chose a very different course for his art.

 Because Liberman is both a modest and a guarded man who has created an impenetrable facade of courtesy and reserve, in many respects he has been as difficult to see through as the glossy, resistant surfaces of his early enamel paintings. Within New York School, he is a unique character: his roots are most closely tied to the School of Paris, where he spent his formative years, but his emotional life ramains tied to Russian culture. Throughout his life, the theme of the world, the publications, whose name is synonymous with Vogue, sharply diverges from his private life with his wife, Tatiana; her daughter, Francine du Plessix; son-in-law, artist Cleve Gray; andgrandsons, Thaddeus and Luke Gray. It is not so musch that Liberman is a classic schizophrenic (Alex the Terrible and the adored Grandpa, for example), the point is rather that he is a Dostoevskian personality, a larger-than-life gambler, adventurer, and mystic haunted by a double who acts as conscience and often requires him to behave unpredictably.

 In the past, artists like Velazquez and Rubens - two heroes high in Liberman's pantheon - have been both men of the world involved with power and international affairs as well as great painters. Today's conception of the artist as marginal to society, a raffish, irresponsible bothmian incapable of running anything, is too narrow for Liberman and too confining for his enormous energies. Betty Parsons attributes Liberman's capacity to lead two lives to the fact that "Russians have two of everything - two stomachs, two heads, two hearts And Alex is, above all, Russian." To his wife, the explanation is simpler:"Alex is Superman," Tatiana says.

 Like Superman, liberman has two costumes, and changing from one to the other signifies a different persona. At work, he is dressed in the same charcoal gray suit (he has two, and a new one is ordered when one wears out). In his painting studio, now attached to his house in Warren, Connecticut, and machinery not fat away - he wears khakis. Either way, he is always in uniform, ready to do battle.

It is almost impossible to get Liberman to talk about hispast. He has no sense of chronology; everthing is happening synchronically in the present. He did, however, consent to taping hours and hours od interviews over a period of several years. This book is based on those interviews and on biographical material found in books by or about his family.

Fortunately for the bewildered art historian typing to reconstruct Liberman's biography, both his parents wrote memoirs. Building Lenin's Russia, his father's account of the years he worked for the Soviet government as Lenin's advisor and the years he spent as manager of the North Timber Trust; and Mon Theatre a Moscou, his mother's story of how she got permission from Lunatcharski to start the first children's state theater to entertain her depressed and melancholy young son shortly after the Recolution, provide the background of Liberman's early life he has chosen to forget.

 One of the consistent stylistic features of Liberman's art is the way in which he contrives to liave himself out the picture - either by working in anonymous geometric styles or with automatic techniques in recent years. Only in his latest paintings and sculpture do we actually see the mark of the artist's own hands, in the scratching and gouging of painting surfaces and in the monumental cut-out form of the environmental sculptures drawn by the artist. According to Liberman's friend, the late Thomas B. Hess, Liberman learned from his Calvinist education in France to believe that Pascal was right when he said, "le moi est haissable" - the ego is hateful - and to strive for anonymity.

 Unlike many contemporay artists, Liberman has never written about himself, but he has demonstrated  unique respect and homage for other artists in his essays on the School of Paris masters, in The Artist in His Studio, and in his photographs of artists he admires. These essays give clues to Liberman's own concerns as an artist. Over and over, he describes those he respects most as "priests" or "monks" of art. The exception is Picasso, whom he sees as an eternal child, a gambler, and an adventurer.

 Photography has been important to Liberman in many ways, not the leastS of which is to give him a fresh perception of form. Through photography, he has studied people, nature, structures and shapes as well as art. Despite the esteem experts have expressed for his photography, Liberman insists that for him photography is not an art but a way of taking notes. Restless, self-critical, enigmatic, comlex, Liberman never wanted his art subjected to the pressures of the art maket. His refusal to be part of the pressures of the art market. His refusal to be part of the art world has earned him great hostility from so-called "revolutionaries" infuriated by an artist who decided to become a worldly  success so he could afford to take the greatest risks in his art. But who is to say when the mild-mannered editor jumps out of his regression is not as complete as that of any drunk or drugged dohemian? As to who is the greater radical - the artist who demonstrates art's importence in ephemeral works or the artist who believes in the trascendent power of art to elevate, inspire, and redeem - only history can answer. (c) ALEXANDER LIBERMAN - BARBARRA ROSE - ABBEVILLE PRESS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK

lexander Liberman was born in 1912 in Kiev Russia. His father was in the timber business and his mother was involved in the Russian theater. In 1921 the Libermans left the Soviet Union, and Alexander studied first in London and then in Paris. He took courses in philosophy and mathematics at the Sorbonne and architecture at Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In the 1930s Liberman designed stage sets, worked briefly with a landscape architect. and worked on the staff of "Vu," the first magazine illustrated with photographs. Consequently, he became friends with Cartier Bresson, Brassai and Kertesz. Liberman began his publishing career as an assistant in the art department, moved on to become art director, then managing director. He even used a nom de plume to write their film reviews. In 1936 Liberman left the magazine and devoted himself to painting, writing and filmmaking.

In 1940 the Liberman family escaped to the unoccupied zone in France, then to Spain, and eventually to New York in 1941. A friend helped him gain employment at VOGUE magazine and twenty years later, in 1962, he was appointed Editorial Director of all Conde Nast Publications, a position he held until he retired in 1994. During his long tenure at VOGUE, Liberman commissioned artists such as: Cornell, Dali, Chagall, Duchamp, Braque, Rauschenberg, Johns to work on projects for the magazine. He was the only publisher granted the rights to reproduce images of Matisse's chapel in Vence, France. He also had Jackson Pollock's paintings used as a backdrop for a fashion shoot by Cecil Beaton, as there was no other way to get Pollock's work reproduced in the magazine. Liberman's "day job" offered him a highly unusual position in the art world.

By the mid-1950s, Liberman was exhibiting his own paintings and photographs in galleries and museums around New York. In 1959 Liberman learned to weld steel and he quickly began making sculpture on a scale that required industrial machinery. By 1963 he had hired an assistant to do all of the grinding and labor required to make large sculpture. He embraced the industrial scale of America that had so impressed him on his arrival to here in 1941.

One of his first public commissions was from the architect Philip Johnson for a pavilion at the 1963 World's Fair. Other important commissions quickly followed, and over the next decade he purchased additional equipment and hired additional personnel to meet the increasing demand for and scale of his sculpture. In this sense his "day job" was supporting his passion for making large public sculpture.

Alexander Liberman died in November, 1999 at the age of 87. His sculpture and painting are included in the collections of some of the world's most prestigious museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In addition, Storm King Art Center, the most important contemporary sculpture park in America, has three monumental Liberman sculptures in it's collection. His public sculpture can be seen in over 40 cities around the world, including three that are located in Los Angeles.