[Dixielandjazz] Al Hirschfeld

[Goggin, Brian (Dublin)]

Bob, here's the obituary and the accompanying photograph.
Best Wishes,
Brian.

 <<21hirsch[1].jpg>> 
Al Hirschfeld, 99, Dies; He Drew Broadway
By RICHARD F. SHEPARD with MEL GUSSOW


l 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
- 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 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. By 18, 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 - 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.

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 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 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 - 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 - 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. 

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 - words by Perelman, pictures by
Hirschfeld - like "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) 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
other living 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 - it could be an ashcan."


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