Alexey Brodovitch

Alexey Brodovitch was art director of Harper's Bazaar for twenty-four years and invented the way modern magazines look. He was born to a wealthy Russian family, fought for the Whites in the civil war, and arrived in Paris in 1920 with nothing, painting sets for Diaghilev before moving into design. Harper's brought him to New York in 1934, and what he did there was treat the double-page spread rather than the single page as the unit of design: white space used as an active element, photographs bled off the edge, type set to follow the shape of an image, and the whole issue paced like a film. He published Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, Bill Brandt, Lisette Model and Richard Avedon, most of them before America had heard of them. His Design Laboratory, a class he ran privately for decades, produced Avedon, Irving Penn, Hiro and Garry Winogrand, and his teaching method was reportedly brutal - he would tear up work in front of students and tell them to astonish him. He drank heavily, lost a son and then his archive in a fire at his Pennsylvania farm in 1956, and died in poverty in France. Almost every glossy magazine still uses his grammar. His book Ballet, published in 1945, was made from blurred and grainy photographs of dance companies and had almost no commercial success; original copies are now extremely valuable. Avedon said everything he knew he had learned from him. The fire destroyed most of his own prints and papers.

• Lived: 1898 CE – 1971 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: artist