The late theater critic Brendan Gill once said there were only two forms of fame on Broadway: seeing your name up in lights and “more significantly, to be drawn by Hirschfeld.”
Theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld’s inimitable depictions of stage, film and television performers and productions were an American institution for more than 70 years.
Hirschfeld, one of the best-known contemporary artists in the world, died Monday in his sleep at his New York home at the age of 99.
Of his uncanny ability to capture a performer’s persona with a few deft and elegant lines, actress Katharine Hepburn said, “It tells the whole story–terrifying!”
Seeing the elderly Hirschfeld beneath a marquee, in his cloaklike black coat, wide-brimmed black hat, walking stick and flowing white beard, always lent something special to opening nights.
Famous in his own right, Hirschfeld was so much a part of the Broadway world that he was given a special Tony Award for his contributions to the theater, though he was not a performer, playwright or producer.
According to The New York Times, for whom Hirschfeld had been doing drawings since 1927, the St. Louis-born artist had worked almost until his death.
Hirschfeld was named an official New York City landmark by the city’s Landmarks Conservancy, and his work was collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other prestigious museums throughout the country.
He could draw in a darkened theater but complained that having to concentrate on the actors’ appearances sometimes kept him from enjoying the performances.
As he once said in a Tribune interview, “I really don’t get to see a lot of the plays because I’m so busy with the drawings of the actors.”
Consequently, he would often journey from his upper East Side townhouse to theaters without his sketch pad, taking in even off-off-Broadway productions for the pure pleasure of it.
As an impoverished artist in Paris in the 1920s, he wore a trim dark beard and rakish mustache and was a member of Gertrude Stein’s Left Bank circle. He would rail at the suggestion that caricature such as his was less than fine art.
“Picasso [and] Modigliani were caricaturists,” he said.
His art, which included not only caricature but also lithography, watercolors, etchings and sculptures, has been sold exclusively by New York’s Margo Feiden Galleries since the 1960s. His prosperity was further increased by the extensive commercial uses to which his drawings were put, including book illustrations, advertisements and even a board game cover, “Juicy People.”
Before becoming a New York fixture, he ranged all over the world, from Paris and Moscow to Tahiti and Bali.
“I have led a ridiculously improbable life,” he said. “It has been peppered with all sorts of crazy accidents.”
Born in St. Louis on June 21, 1903, Hirschfeld was the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant mother who spoke no English and a German-Jewish third-generation American father who spoke neither Russian nor Yiddish.
Push out of St. Louis
A local artist recognized Hirschfeld’s talent and encouraged him to take up art, and he urged him to get out of St. Louis, which he told Hirschfeld was “no place for an artist.”
On the strength of that advice, his mother moved the family to New York when Hirschfeld was 11. He went on to study at the National Academy of Design, the New York Art Students League and at the Julienne Academy in Paris.
Before moving to France, he worked as art director for Selznick Pictures in New York. As an expatriate American in Paris’ bohemian Montparnasse district, he knew such subsequently famous artists and writers as Ernest Hemingway, whom he called “a very talented bully.”
Stein, he said, “was a wonderful person with young artists. You could always go to her place to have tea and get warm in the winter.”
He sold his first theatrical drawing–a sketch of actor Sacha Guitry–to the New York Herald Tribune in 1926; in 1927 he began his long association with The New York Times.
In 1931, he went to Tahiti, which he found too full of tourists. He moved from there to Bali and a house he borrowed from artist and friend Miguel Covarrubias. There he fell under the influence of Asian art styles and the intense sunlight, which he said bleached out the colors and left “the image of pure line.”
It was after his South Pacific sojourn that Hirschfeld developed his unique style.
Virtually every Broadway star from the 1920s to the present–from Harry Lauder and Tallulah Bankhead to Rex Harrison and Madonna–became the subject of his caricature.
Protector of Shaw
His many close theatrical friends included Moss Hart, whom he unsuccessfully tried to persuade not to make a musical called “My Fair Lady” from a satirical play by George Bernard Shaw.
“I said, `How are you going to improve upon `Pygmalion?'” Hirschfeld recalled. “`What are you going to do, add a few songs?'”
Hirschfeld produced numerous books, including collections of his drawings and several collaborations with humorist S.J. Perelman that began with 1948’s “Westward Ha!”
A 1996 documentary film on his life and work, “The Line King,” was nominated for an Oscar and telecast on PBS.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Hirschfeld dabbled at political cartooning, producing the memorable Politico-Erotica, which depicted Adolf Hitler and his storm troopers as a troupe of effeminate prancers and later helped inspire Mel Brooks’ hit comedy “The Producers.”
He also angered New Yorker founder and Editor Harold Ross by showing how, with the addition of a large mustache, Ross could be made to look like Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
A one-time contributor to the leftist New Masses magazine, Hirschfeld drifted away from political work.
“It’s a big responsibility, telling people what to think,” he said. “I don’t like to influence people that way.”
In 1943, Hirschfeld married German-born actress Dolly Hass, who died in 1994. Two years later, Hirschfeld married museum curator Louise Kerz, who survives him.
Hirschfeld is also survived by his daughter, Nina, born in 1945, who became a subtle hallmark of his work after he took to hiding the letters of her name in his drawings. Finding the “Nina” became as avid a preoccupation for some Times readers as the daily crossword puzzle.
