HIRSCHFELD, AL

HIRSCHFELD, AL (Albert; 1903–2003), U.S. caricaturist. Born in St. Louis, Hirschfeld moved with his family to New York where he was 12 and had already started art lessons. He attended the Art Students League. By 18 he was art director for Selznick Pictures. In 1924 he went to Paris, where he continued his studies in painting, sculpture, and drawing. On a trip to Bali, where the intense sun bleached out all color and reduced people to "walking line drawings," he recalled, he became "enchanted with line" and concentrated on that technique. At the theater in New York in 1926 he doodled a sketch in the dark on the program. Asked to repeat it on a clean piece of paper, he produced a sketch that appeared on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune, which gave him more assignments. Some weeks later he was engaged by the New York Times to sketch Harry Lauder, the Scottish entertainer, who was on one of his innumerable farewell tours. Thus began a lifelong relationship with the Times. His sketches over a 75-year career captured the vivid personalities of theater people. 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 drew Barbra streisand birdlike, with wide-open mouth and lidded eyes. Zero Mostel, the original 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. Hirschfeld's work also appeared in books 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. In the 1930s and 1940s he wrote articles on comedians, actors, Greenwich Village, and films for the Times. In the 1920s and 1930s, imbued with a sense of social concern, 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 did of the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, the right-wing, antisemitic priest, he renounced a political approach to his work. He was represented by the Margo Feiden Galleries, which once estimated that there were more than 7,000 Hirschfeld originals in existence. In 1991 the United States Postal Service issued a booklet of five 29-cent stamps honoring comedians as designed by the artist. 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 one of six New York City landmarks by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. A few days before the end of his life, he was notified that the American Academy of Arts and Letters had elected him a member and President George W. Bush notified him that he was one of the recipients of the National Medal of Arts. On June 21, 2003, his 100th birthday, the Martin Beck Theater of West 45th Street in New York was renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theater. (Stewart Kampel (2nd ed.)