American artist (1903-2003). Though born in
St. Louis, he grew up in
Manhattan. As a teenager in
New York City, Al studied
art and worked for various
movie studios and
producers, including
Samuel Goldwyn,
David O. Selznick, and
Warner Brothers, creating art for advertisements. In fact, he was the
art director for
Selznick Studios in 1921, when he was just 17. Unfortunately, Selznick Studios went
bankrupt, but Hirschfeld was able to pay off his employees by taking some extra work with Warners.
Hirschfeld traveled to
Paris in 1925, where he threw himself into
painting. He returned to the
United States after six months, ready to work full-time as a
painter, but a new
career opened up when a
sketch he made of
actor Sacha Guitry was published in the
New York Herald Tribune. In only two years, his theatrical sketches were appearing in five different
newspapers, including the
New York Times, which was his primary employer through the years.
Hirschfeld continued to work on paintings and
lithographs, but making sketches of the NYC
theatre world paid very well -- he made more trips to Paris and to
Russia, thanks to his sketches, though he also made a trip
overseas when
Charlie Chaplin bought a number of his
watercolors.
And by the 1930s, his
cartooning style was already well-established --
exagerration and
caricature, buoyed by
smooth,
clean,
curving lines. His few
straight lines were mainly used for
texture, though in his early years, he was also fairly
innovative in using
splotches and solid blacks for texture.
Of course, Hirschfeld's art is probably best known because of his daughter,
Nina, who was born in 1945. He began working her
name into all of his sketches, both for the theatre and for caricatures. He'd often add the "NINA" into the strands of someone's
hair or into the patterns of a piece of
clothing. This quickly turned into a
game that Hirschfeld would play with his readers and helped his work gain a wider
audience than before.
Quite aside from the "NINA" game, however, Hirschfeld's artwork is
stunning and
beautiful in how much it can
convey in a relatively small number of lines. I'm not aware of any
caricaturist who can draw the way Hirschfeld did -- his cartoons appeared
flighty,
fanciful, unplanned, all over the map, but they captured their subjects
precisely. His drawings of
the Marx Brothers,
Greta Garbo,
Bob Hope,
Carol Channing -- hell, thousands of people, in
entertainment,
politics,
literature,
business -- all of them capture that person's
appearance, their
mannerisms, almost transcribe their
soul onto paper. He was a damn, damn good
artist.
Hirschfeld died in his sleep on
January 20, 2003, but he was certainly the
poster child for "
You're Only as Old as You Feel." He was six months away from his
100th birthday (and
Broadway had a big
celebration lined up for him, including renaming a
theater for him) and was working harder than ever. He'd just published a caricature of dancer
Tommy Tune in December and was working on several others. In fact, he'd been working on some
sketches the day before he died. I'll be
lucky if I can hold myself upright when I'm 99 years old, much less hold a
pen.
Addendum: kthejoker sez:
"Disney's Fantasia 2000 sequence for Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue" is based quite vividly on the Hirschfeld style of drawing."Research from http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/hirschfe.htm and from "Newsday", Jan. 21, 2003