Al Hirschfeld, Caricaturist of Theater Scene, Dies at 99
January 20, 2003
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Albert Hirschfeld, whose inimitable caricatures captured
the appearance and personality of theater people for more
than half a century, died in his sleep today in New York
City. He was 99 years old.
Mr. Hirschfeld was the best-known artist in the world of
theater and had won a special Tony - an Antoinette Perry
award - as a sign that the theater world welcomed him not
only as an observer but also as one of its own.
He was a familiar figure at first nights and at rehearsals
where he had perfected the technique of making a sketch in
the dark, using a system of shorthand notations that
contributed to the finished product.
He continued to work and to drive his own car well into his
90's, virtually until his death. In 1996, a film
documentary of the artist's life by Susan W. Dryfoos, "The
Line King," rich in tributes from those he had drawn and
from those he worked with, drew the comment from Nora
Sayre, reviewing the movie in The New York Times: "At
present he is 93, and that is the least important thing
about him." The film was nominated for an Academy Award.
In that year, Mr. Hirschfeld was also named as one of six
New York City Landmarks by the New York Landmarks
Conservancy.
Mr. Hirschfeld was best known for the caricatures that
appeared in the drama pages of The New York Times. But his
work also appeared in books and other publications and is
in the collections of many museums, including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and
the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, the Fogg
Museum in Cambridge, Mass., and the museums of art in St.
Louis, his hometown, and Cleveland.
His other artistic work often reflected his travels to the
South Pacific and to Japan, where he was deeply influenced
by esthetics and techniques.
To be the subject of a Hirschfeld drawing endowed one with
a special cachet. To find the word "Nina," the name of his
daughter, which was often hidden several times in the lines
of his caricatures, was a weekend pastime for millions of
readers.
His art was compared by critics with that of Daumier and
Toulouse-Lautrec but, ultimately, it was all Hirschfeld,
cannily perceptive, wittily amusing and benignly pointed.
Mr. Hirschfeld's art was distinguished by his deep feeling
for people. He never went for the jugular, except on one
occasion, when he did an ironic drawing of David Merrick,
the producer, as a demonic Santa Claus. Mr. Merrick, to Mr.
Hirschfeld's mixed reaction, liked it so much that he
bought it and used it on his Christmas cards.
"The art of caricature, or rather the special branch of it
that interests me, is not necessarily one of malice," the
artist wrote in an introduction to his 1970 book, "The
World of Hirschfeld."
"It is never my aim to destroy the play or the actor by
ridicule," he continued. "The passion of personal
conviction belongs to the playwright; the physical
interpretation of the character belongs to the actor; the
delineation in line belongs to me. My contribution is to
take the character - created by the playwright and acted
out by the actor - and reinvent it for the reader."
Mr. Hirschfeld's "reinventions" caught the spirit of their
subjects with lines that, studied individually, might seem
irrelevant but, taken together, added up to characteristic
eyes, hairdos and motions - all in such a way as to distill
the character of the person under study.
Ray Bolger once said he had copied the artist's conception
of his appearance. Mr. Hirschfeld conceded that it was one
of the phenomenons of caricature that often, in a way, the
subject began to look more like the drawing than he
actually looked like himself.
Barbra Streisand emerged birdlike, all points, with
wide-open mouth and exotically lidded eyes. Zero Mostel, as
Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof," came across as a circle of
black beard and hair with fierce eyes peering upward, as at
a heaven that did not understand. Phil Silvers was all high
forehead and eyeglasses, atop a small curve of a mouth.
Illustrating a 1966 production of Chekhov's "Ivanov," John
Gielgud's bearded face thrusts forward, with slitted eyes
and a look that conveys an impression of being very Slavic
indeed. There are stars in the eyes, over the toothy grin,
of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, drawn in 1944.
Standing Out Amid the Newsprint
"Mr. Hirschfeld's style
is ideally suited to the newspaper," John Russell, art
critic of The Times, wrote in a review of a Hirschfeld
volume. "His strong compositions and brilliant areas of
texture smash into the overall gray of the newsprint page
and his blacks - whether George Burns's cigar, Arthur
Miller's spectacles or Emlyn Williams's eyebrows -
punctuate his drawings like cymbal clashes in a Brahms
overture."
"The alert reader will be able to find several actors and
actresses depicted more than once and can enjoy the
transformation that the actor undergoes in many roles," Mr.
Russell added.
Mr. Hirschfeld cut a striking figure, a lively,
white-haired, white-bearded man about 5 feet 8 inches tall,
who described himself this way: "A couple of huge eyes and
huge mattress of hair. Large eyes with superimposed
eyebrows. No forehead. The forehead that you see is just
the hair disappearing."
He was never at a loss for words or pictures; in the 1930's
and 40's, he wrote pieces on comedians, actors, Greenwich
Village and films for The Times. In one, he sharply
criticized "Snow White," Walt Disney's animated movie, for
imitating "pantographically" factual photography and for
being in the "oopsy-woopsy school of art practiced mostly
by etchers who portray dogs with cute sayings."
His own finished products were completed mostly on the
drawing board next to the barber's chair he used while
working in the Manhattan brownstone in the East 90's that
he shared with his wife, the actress Dolly Haas.
Enchanted by Line On a Trip to Bali
His caricatures began
in his mind's eye, and it was only as he limned them on
paper that the lines juxtaposed into the pictures he had
conceived. Some editors with photographically literal minds
occasionally found his artistic flights of fancy too
outspoken for their own tastes, but they rarely interfered
with his freedom to interpret as he saw fit.
The Hirschfeld story began on June 21, 1903, when he was
born in St. Louis, one of three sons of Isaac and Rebecca
Hirschfeld.
When he was 12 years old and had already started art
lessons, the family moved to New York City. He attended
public schools and the Art Students League. At 16, he
worked as an office boy. Two years later he became an art
director for David O. Selznick, the motion-picture
producer, and then moved to Warner Brothers. In 1924, he
went to Paris where he continued his studies in painting,
sculpture and drawing.
It was during a trip to Bali - where the intense sun
bleached out all color and reduced people to "walking line
drawings," as he later recalled - that he became "enchanted
with line" and concentrated on that technique.
Doodling a Sketch In the Dark
While on a visit to New
York in 1926 from Paris, he went to the theater one evening
with Richard Maney, a theatrical press agent who was
handling his first show, a production that starred Sacha
Guitry, the French star, in his first American performance.
With a pencil, Mr. Hirschfeld doodled a sketch in the dark
on his program. Mr. Maney liked it and asked Mr. Hirschfeld
to repeat it on a clean piece of paper that could be placed
in a newspaper. It appeared on the front page of The New
York Herald-Tribune, which gave him more assignments. These
were followed by orders from other papers. Alexander
Woolcott, the drama critic who was then at The New York
World, asked for some Hirschfeld drawings, starting with
one of himself.
Some weeks later, the artist received a telegram from Sam
Zolotow of The Times's drama department asking for a
drawing of Harry Lauder, who was making one of his numerous
farewell appearances. Mr. Hirschfeld delivered it to the
messenger desk at the newspaper. A few weeks later, he had
another assignment from The Times and gave the result to
the desk once again.
This went on for about two years, he later recalled, until
he first met Mr. Zolotow in a theater lobby. He was told to
deliver his next drawing in person and he did, making the
acquaintance of Brooks Atkinson, then The Times's drama
critic, who became a close friend.
Lester Markel, the Sunday editor of The Times, suggested
that Mr. Hirschfeld work exclusively in the field of
theater for the newspaper. The artist welcomed the
arrangement because he felt it gave him greater freedom.
The custom elsewhere was for the producer of the show to
pay for the drawings, but The Times paid the artist
directly. Mr. Hirschfeld never was a salaried employee of
The Times but worked on a freelance basis that left
ownership of his work in his hands after it had been
published in the newspaper.
Closer to Groucho Than to Karl Marx
He applied his art to
other subjects elsewhere. In the 1920's and early 30's,
imbued with a sense of social concern, Mr. Hirschfeld did
serious lithographs that appeared, for no fee, in The New
Masses, a Communist-line magazine. Eventually, he realized
that the magazine's interest was politics rather than art.
After a dispute about a caricature he had made of Father
Charles E. Coughlin, the right-wing, anti-Semitic radio
priest, the artist renounced a political approach to his
work and, in his book, "The World of Hirschfeld," later
wrote, "I have ever since been closer to Groucho Marx than
to Karl."
Although his work for the newspaper was in black and white,
he worked in color for such publications as American
Mercury magazine, for which he drew many covers.
The Hirschfelds' daughter, Nina, was born in 1945. On Nov.
5 of that year, her name made its debut in the pages of The
Times's Sunday edition, on an imagined poster in a circus
scene for a drawing about a new musical, "Are You With It?"
The world may have lost track of the show but it kept up
with Nina, a name covertly insinuated into a caricature
several times - perhaps in the fold of a dress, a kink of
hair, the bend of an arm.
So popular did the Ninas become that the military used them
in the training of bomber pilots to spot targets. A
Department of Defense consultant found them useful in the
study of camouflage techniques.
The Number of Ninas? Look in the Lower Right
Mr.
Hirschfeld realized how addicted readers had become to
Ninas when he purposely omitted them one Sunday only to be
besieged by complaints from frustrated Nina hunters.
One Nina fan was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, then the publisher
of The Times. In 1960 he wrote a letter to Mr. Hirschfeld
to say that he always first looked for Ninas in Hirschfeld
drawings but had learned that each included more than one.
"That really isn't fair, since not knowing how many there
are leaves one with a sense of frustration," Mr. Sulzberger
wrote.
A letter from another reader suggested that the artist note
in the caricature how many times a Nina appeared. From that
time on, Mr. Hirschfeld appended the number of Ninas in the
lower right-hand corner of each drawing.
Mr. Hirschfeld believed that acceptance of caricatures was
a slow process and one that was always difficult for the
artist. Occasionally, actors and producers hinted at
lawsuits or withdrawal of advertising because they did not
find his drawings sufficiently attractive.
But his art flourished and endured and, indeed, it
sometimes seemed as though there were Hirschfelds at every
point of the compass. He was represented for more than a
quarter of a century by the Margo Feiden Galleries, which
once estimated that there were more than 7,000 Hirschfeld
originals in existence. One that is no longer in existence
is a Hirschfeld self-portrait reproduced in paint on
Madison Avenue between 62d and 63d Streets, in front of the
gallery in 1994. It was 48 feet long, complete with Ninas,
and survived a partial washout by rain the first day.
If you couldn't join Hirschfeld, you could lick him. In
1991 the United States Postal Service issued a booklet of
five 29-cent stamps honoring comedians - Stan Laurel and
Oliver Hardy, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Jack
Benny, Fanny Brice and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello - as
designed by the artist; contrary to post office policy
forbidding secret marks, he was allowed to insert his
trademark Ninas into the depictions. He also did the
drawings for other stamps representing Lon Chaney, Clara
Bow, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the Keystone Kops and
Rudolf Valentino. In 1987, Mr. Hirschfeld's caricature of
Trygve Lie, first Secretary General of the United Nations,
went on a cover issued by the World Federation of United
Nations Associations.
Travel Books With S. J. Perelman
In the early 1940's, he and a friend, the writer S. J.
Perelman, collaborated on a musical with Ogden Nash and
Vernon Duke. It was called "Sweet Bye and Bye" and opened
and closed in Philadelphia on the same night without ever
reaching Broadway.
"We had to leave the country after that," Mr. Hirschfeld
later said.
Subsequent travels resulted in such books - words by
Perelman, pictures by Hirschfeld - as "Westward Ha! or
Around the World in 80 Clichés" and "Swiss Family
Perelman."
Mr. Hirschfeld wrote several books by himself, including
"Show Business Is No Business" (reissued in 1983), "The
American Theater as Seen by Hirschfeld," the
autobiographical "The World of Hirschfeld"and "Show
Business Is No Business: Hirschfeld's World and Art and
Recollections From Eight Decades."
In 1995, he was enshrined in the on-line age by a CD-ROM,
"Hirschfeld: The Great Entertainers." He received more
honors and awards than perhaps any other living American
artist. He received a special Tony award in 1975 and was
the first recipient, in 1984, of the Brooks Atkinson Award,
bestowed on him by the League of New York Theaters and
Producers and the American Theater Wing.
Dolly Haas Hirschfeld, who was his wife, adviser and social
director for 52 years, died in 1994. An earlier marriage to
Florence Ruth Hobby ended in divorce. In 1996 he married
Louise Kerz, a research historian in the arts and a
longtime friend, who survives him. He is also survived by
his daughter and a grandson, Matthew.
In something of a self-critique, Mr. Hirschfeld, in a
letter to The Times in 1986, expressed his opinion about an
article in the Science section on defining beauty. "Beauty
is incapable of being defined scientifically or
esthetically," he wrote. "Anarchy takes over. Having
devoted a long life to the art of caricature I have rarely
convinced anyone that caricature and beauty are synonymous.
Beauty may be the limited proportions of a classic Greek
sculptured figure but it does not have to be - it could be
an ashcan."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company. |
