Young Turk

Over slivers of goose liver at Horcher's in Berlin, Publisher Conde Nast told Vogue's Editor Edna Woolman Chase and Vanity Fair's Editor Frank Crowninshield that he had just found the ideal art director for his U. S. string of swank magazines. The latest candidate had clinched the job by the calm disdain with which he dismissed able, dapper Publisher Nast's theories on illustration and makeup. This Young Turk was in fact a young Turk, by name Mehemed Fehmy Agha. That was ten years ago. Last week PM, the lively little magazine for production managers and art directors, devoted its latest issue to Agha's American Decade. Its "paeans with pictures from colleagues and disciples" demonstrated how great has been, still is Dr. Agha's influence on U. S. publication design.

Dr. Agha's success formula is to start a publishing fad, develop another before its popularity has waned. First in the U. S. was he to drop capital letters from a magazine's typography, to "bleed" illustrations to a page's edge. Other dodges of his: asymmetric layouts, wide white margins ("space for your laundry list"), photographs with cockeyed perspective. Says he of his devices: "Their effectiveness begins to wear off when everybody does it. . . . If you are different, you are all right." In a field notorious for its vicious circle of mutual imitation, Agha usually manages to be different.

To be an ambassador, not an art director, was Agha's early ambition. A dark, widish man, son of a landowner and tobacco magnate who had kept his Turkish citizenship, he was born 43 years ago at Nikolaev in the Russian Ukraine. In 1917 he was studying at the Polytechnic Institute in Petrograd, became successively a civil servant under Kerensky, a painter of party posters under Lenin. Five years later, while clerking in his brother's delicatessen shop in Paris, he drifted into designing, soon grew successful in the field of elegant advertisement.

Agha's doctorate is a courtesy title conferred upon him in Berlin, where doctors are as common as colonels in Kentucky. A famed photographer and storyteller, he also plays chess extremely well, for a man without a beard. Outwardly he is as hard-boiled as a Hemingway hero, underneath as sentimental. Symbol of his wry self-depreciation of arts at which he excels is his poem, The Hippocratic Oath of a Photographer:

I never have

and never will,

under any circumstances,

take a picture of a nude holding a transparent bubble.

Neither will I ever take,

help to take, approve of taking

admire, discuss, or look at

a picture of an egg. . . .

I will not take pictures of nursing mothers,

or old ladies in rockers, knitting,

entitled "The Evening of Life." . . .

I will never again photograph plaster casts of Greek statues,

or cabbages cut in half,

or salad leaves with drops of dew on them. . . .

In fact, if I can help it

I will refrain from taking any pictures of any description, under

any pretext whatsoever.

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