[Dixielandjazz] Hirschfield Obit

[Stephen Barbone]

Here is the Hirscfeld Obit per your request.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

January 21, 2003  NEW YORK TIMES

Al Hirschfeld, 99, Dies; He Drew Broadway

By RICHARD F. SHEPARD with MEL GUSSOW

       Al Hirschfeld, whose inimitable caricatures captured the vivid
personalities of theater people and their performances for more than 75
years, died at his home in Manhattan yesterday. He was 99.

To be the subject of a Hirschfeld drawing endowed one with a special
cachet. To find the word "Nina," the name of his daughter, hidden
several times in the lines of his caricatures, was a weekend pastime for
millions of readers. Next to his signature he put the number of "Ninas"
in his drawings, creating a sort of pleasurable Sunday game for his
admirers.

In a career that spanned the 20th century, he probably saw more shows
than anyone else. He drew a vast and imaginative portrait of the
performing artists of his lifetime, particularly in the theater. 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.

His art was compared by critics to that of Daumier and Toulouse-Lautrec
but, ultimately, it was 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.
Merrick, to Mr. Hirschfeld's mixed reaction, liked the image so much
that he bought it and used it on his
Christmas cards.

Mr. Hirschfeld continued to work and to drive his own car virtually
until his death. On Saturday, as usual, he was at work in his studio,
drawing the Marx brothers, all of whom were his friends, his wife,
Louise Kerz Hirschfeld, said.

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, was nominated for an Academy Award. That year he 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 and the St. Louis Art
Museum, in his hometown. His other artistic work often reflected his
travels to the South Pacific and to Japan, where he was deeply
influenced by aesthetics and techniques.

"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 Ñ created by the playwright and
acted out by the actor Ñ 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 Ñ all in
such a way as to distill the character of his subject.

Ray Bolger told the artist that he tried to imitate the figure in Mr.
Hirschfeld's portrait of him, a dancer with amazingly elastic limbs. Mr.
Hirschfeld conceded that it was one of the phenomena 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
lidded eyes. Zero Mostel, as Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof," appeared as
a circle of beard and hair with fierce eyes peering upward, as at a
heaven that did not understand. Phil Silvers was all forehead and
eyeglasses, atop a small curve of a mouth.

Mr. Hirschfeld cut a striking figure, a lively, white-haired,
white-bearded man about 5 feet 8 inches tall, who saw 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 (who died in 1994), and later with Louise Kerz Hirschfeld.

The Hirschfeld story began on June 21, 1903, when Albert Hirschfeld 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. By18, he art director for Selznick Pictures. In 1924 he went to
Paris where he continued his studies in painting, sculpture and drawing.

It was during a trip to Bali Ñ where the intense sun bleached out all
color and reduced people to "walking line drawings," as he later
recalled Ñ that he became "enchanted with line" and concentrated on that
technique.

While on a visit to New York in 1926 from Paris, he went to the theater
one evening with Richard Maney, a 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. 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.

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.

This went on for about two years, he later recalled, until he first met
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. Mr. Hirschfeld was
never 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.

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 thatappeared, 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 the Rev. 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."

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, 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 Ñ 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 Pentagon consultant found
them useful in the study of camouflage techniques. 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," 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 it sometimes seemed as if 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 62nd and
63rd 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.

In 2000 Mr. Hirschfeld had a dispute with Ms. Feiden, filing a suit in
State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Mr. Hirschfeld subsequently dropped
the case, and the two signed another contract, which gave the artist
control over the exhibition of his drawings in museums.

If you could not join Hirschfeld, you could lick him. In 1991 the United
States Postal Service issued a booklet of five 29-cent stamps honoring
comedians Ñ Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Edgar Bergen and Charlie
McCarthy, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Ñ as
designed by the artist; contrary
to post office policy forbidding secret marks, he was allowed to insert
his trademark Ninas into the depictions.

In the early 1940's he and a close 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.

"We had to leave the country after that," Mr. Hirschfeld later said.

Subsequent travels resulted in books Ñ words by Perelman, pictures by
Hirschfeld Ñ like "Westward Ha! or Around the World in 80 Clich*s" and
"Swiss Family Perelman." Mr. Hirschfeld wrote several books by himself,
including "Show Business Is No Business" (reissued in 1983) and "The
American Theater as Seen by Hirschfeld." "Hirschfeld on Line" was
published in 1999, followed by "Hirschfeld's New York" and "Hirschfeld's
Hollywood," published simultaneously with exhibitions at museums in both
cities. In June, Applause Books will republish two of his classic works,
"The Speakeasies of 1932" and "Hirschfeld's Harlem."

In 1995, he was enshrined in the online age by a CD-ROM, "Hirschfeld:
The Great Entertainers." He received more honors and awards than perhaps
any otherliving American artist. As befitting his longevity, he received
two Tony Awards, a special award in 1975 and, in 1984, he was the first
recipient of the Brooks Atkinson Award.

Dolly Haas Hirschfeld was his wife, adviser and social director for 52
years. 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,
Nina Hirschfeld West of Austin, Tex.; a
grandson, Matthew, and a granddaughter, Margaret, both of Austin; and
two stepsons, Jonathan Kerz of Larchmont, N.Y., and Antony Kerz of Rocky
Hill, Conn.

His wife said he was elated after receiving two messages on Friday, a
letter from the American Academy of Arts and Letters saying that he had
been elected to the academy, and a phone call from Washington saying
that he would be one of the recipients of the National Medal of Arts, to
be presented by President Bush at the White House this year. When he was
informed of the honors, he said, "If you live long enough, everything
happens."

Mr. Hirschfeld was the most celebrated artist in the theater and on June
21, when he would have been 100 years old, he will have the ultimate
Broadway accolade. The Martin Beck Theater on West 45th Street will be
renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theater.

Two days later a benefit for the Actors' Fund that would have celebrated
his centenary will be held as scheduled at the Al Hirschfeld Theater on
Broadway.

In something of a self-criticism, 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 aesthetically," 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 Ñ it could be an ashcan."