Review by New York Times Review
WHEN I FINISHED reading "The Hirschfeld Century: Portrait of an Artist and His Age," I cried. I cried because it had been too long since a joyous Al Hirschfeld drawing heralded the opening of a Broadway show on the cover of The New York Times's Arts & Leisure section. I cried because it had been too long since I'd seen AI Hirschfeld at the theater, pen in hand, waiting like a kid for the show to begin. I cried because when I told my 44-year-old brother that I was writing about AI Hirschfeld, he looked blank before saying, "The guy with the 'Ninas'?" I first met the guy with the "Ninas" in 1995 when he was 92, in the 75th year of his career. Al was the youngest old man on the planet. When something pleased him - a book, a play, a joke - he would proclaim it "MAAAH-velous!" He had recently driven through Italy, and he gave me a lift home from the theater one night, blithely unaware that he never turned on his headlights. In 2000, when I gave a party at Frankie & Johnnie's, the steakhouse on West 45 th Street, I forgot about its two flights of stairs and invited Al, then 97. He came. He had been going there since the 1930s, when it was a speakeasy. The last time I saw him, in the fall of 2002, three months before he died, he was 99. He and his third wife, Louise, joined a group of friends at Barbetta, a theater district restaurant Al had frequented for 70 years, initially with the illustrator Miguel Covarrubias, who would be his greatest influence. Al began dinner with his usual, a Jack Daniel's on the rocks. By the time dessert arrived and Louise reached for whatever pills he was meant to take, she looked at him laughing and talking, put them back in her bag and let it rip. With material like Al Hirschfeld, it is obviously hard to go wrong. David Leopold wrote "The Hirschfeld Century" and selected its drawings (he also curated the current Hirschfeld exhibit of the same name at the New-York Historical Society). Even to aficionados, many of his choices will feel fresh, a paean to the talent and discipline of the artist, including early paintings and movie posters, most of them in color. As for the text, Leopold visited Hirschfeld weekly for 13 years, and when his subject speaks, his verbal wit equals that of his visuals, every time. For the uninitiated - my brother included -Albert Hirschfeld was born in St. Louis in 1903, the youngest of three sons. He started drawing as a child, and at the urging of a local artist, the family relocated to New York City when the boy was 12. There, he studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. He considered becoming a sculptor, before concluding that sculpture was "just a drawing you could trip over in the dark." He began his career by illustrating movie posters and at 21 was the art director at Selznick Pictures. When it went bankrupt, he found work at other studios and also at newspapers; his first theatrical drawing, of the French actor and director Sacha Guitry, appeared in The New York Herald Tribune in 1926. "The posters are where he really became Hirschfeld," Leopold writes. "The image had to be transmitted immediately as one passed the theater, and therefore had to be rendered as simply as possible." For his painting, Hirschfeld traveled to Paris, Moscow, Tahiti and finally, at Covarrubias's urging, to Bali in 1932. "The Balinese sun seemed to bleach out all color, leaving everything in pure line," he wrote. "It was in Bali that my attraction to drawing blossomed into an enduring love affair with line." By the 1980s, he reflected: "I've found no formulas____All I know is to keep paring it down, eliminating, until it's pure line that communicates." Hirschfeld married the German actress Dolly Haas in 1943, and their daughter, Nina, was born in 1945. In celebration, Hirschfeld slipped her name into some drawings, thinking only friends would notice. Besides becoming a beloved parlor game, searching for "Nina" transcended show business: The Pentagon used Hirschfeld's drawings to train pilots to pinpoint targets, and a University of Pennsylvania medical researcher used them to train doctors to read certain X-rays more carefully. Though Hirschfeld continued drawing movie posters through the 1940s, demand declined after the war. As Leopold notes, editors and art directors thought readers preferred photographs to drawings, "and the satiric snap of much of caricature had little place in homogenized postwar America. Al not only survived but prospered because he wasn't really a caricaturist. He saw himself as a 'characterist.' The satire of his art was more a slap on the back than a spit in the eye." Theater became his primary beat. To the casual observer, the sly humor and economy of Hirschfeld's work could make it look too easy. In the 1950s, Collier's magazine assigned him a cover of Liberace, who loved the portrait, with its heart-shaped face. His representatives contacted the artist, who quoted his price. They sent back a "furiously worded letter apprising me of Mr. Liberace's great collection of paintings," Hirschfeld recalled. "Portraits of the master done by great artists, and up to now, no one had ever asked for money. I responded immediately, apologizing for the misunderstanding and my seeming ingratitude at being selected for inclusion in this remarkable collection. I promised to faithfully dispatch, without further ado, the original painting to Mr. Liberace posthaste without payment of any kind, to hang in his living room ... on one condition - that they send me Mr. Liberace to hang in mine." The last new Hirschfeld drawing to appear in The Times was of Tommy Tune, in December 2002. The following month, while working on a commission of the Marx Brothers, Hirschfeld felt ill and went to bed. He died the next day, Jan. 20, 2003. In his final hours, as he drifted in and out of consciousness, he raised his arm and started drawing in the air. Louise asked what he was doing, and he replied, "I'm practicing my perspective." No need for that, actually. No need at all. ? 'The satire of his art was more a slap on the back than a spit in the eye.' ALEX WITCHEL is a former reporter for The Times. Her latest book is "All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother's Dementia. With Refreshments."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 12, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Al Hirschfeld's performing-arts caricatures, which enlivened the pages of the New York Times for 75 years, are ebullient works of fine art, what with the precision and vivacity of his line, vivid articulation of his subjects' personalities, and virtuoso rendering of motion. Born in St. Louis in 1903, Hirschfeld died in 2003, having spent his long, exuberantly productive life attending opening nights and drawing dynamic portraits of each era's defining stars of stage, film, and television. With perpetual curiosity, a passionate work ethic, and a seemingly unquenchable thirst for assignments, the prolific Hirschfeld also created movie posters, magazine covers, postage stamp designs, and book illustrations. Curator David Leopold has been immersed in all things Hirschfeld for 25 years and now presents a gloriously illustrated, decade-by-decade account of the work and life of the irrepressible caricaturist, or, as Hirschfeld preferred, characterist. Given his trust in chance and spontaneity, it's fitting that Hirschfeld's first drawing was published after it was fished out of a wastepaper basket at Goldwyn Pictures where, at 17, he was working as a gofer. Hirschfeld's career took off and never stopped as he embraced the ever-changing arts world with an almost childlike sense of wonder, ultimately creating a visual history of the twentieth century's performance milestones. Leopold emulates the economy and fluidity of Hirschfeld's drawings in this star-studded, anecdote-rich, critically clarifying, and thoroughly enlightening portrait of the portraitist.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
After spending 25 years immersed in the work of Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003), an artist who made some 10,000 drawings during his life, Leopold (Hirschfeld's Hollywood) has carefully assembled a diverse collection of 366 works spanning the artist's 82 year career, from the landscapes he painted in North Africa, Bali, and Tahiti to his more recognizable portraits of countless celebrities. This lively biography documents the evolution of Hirschfeld's distinct line during each decade-in his work for movie studios, Broadway productions, newspapers, and magazines-and contains many interviews with the artist, revealing the amalgamation of influences, including other artists and cultures, that helped to shape his "distinctly American form of drawing." Though the comprehensive text primarily centers on the professional life of the artist, Leopold also manages to recreate the dizzy exhilaration of Broadway and the film industry in the early 20th century at a time when celebrity culture was just beginning to emerge, and when Modernism was simultaneously being injected into the theatre, music, and Hirschfeld's work. Best of all are Leopold's passionate descriptions of Hirschfeld as an entirely nonjudgmental humanist who gave up landscape painting in favor of portraiture to create a uniquely democratic art. "While many people saw the films or the Broadway productions," writes Leopold, "even more saw Al's artwork." This monograph is a diverting study of a towering figure in 20th-century illustration. Illus. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Editor Leopold spent 20 years documenting Hirschfeld's life and work (1903-2003), visiting the artist in his studio and then working for the Hirschfeld Foundation. The artist seems to have drawn or painted everyone who was anyone in the performing arts during the 20th century. The result of Leopold's research is a brilliant volume that offers not only a scholarly evaluation of Hirschfeld's work but also a highly enjoyable study of caricature, Broadway, Hollywood, and the century's performers. While Hirschfeld is best known for his black-and-white caricatures and outstanding use of "line," this title includes many color works, displaying his superb technique. He created 10,000 drawings in his lifetime; clearly Leopold had to make many judgement calls. Still, there is an embarrassment of riches here as readers are taken decade through decade of the world of performance. Both iconic images and the obscure are included. Such personalities as Laurel and Hardy, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and others are immediately recognizable, but the image of Congressman Claude Pepper in the shape of the state of Florida, as well as that of former U.S. vice president Spiro Agnew, may come as a surprise. -VERDICT Highly recommended for those interested in the performing arts, American culture, and the art of drawing and caricature.-Susan L. Peters, Univ. of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A richly illustrated study of the artist who richly illustrated publications, marquees, and other venues for eight decades. Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) was, in the words of museum curator Leopold, "a visual journalist who reported' what he saw, with no interest in picking winners or losers, but looking for character whether it was expressed in word, music, or movement, which he would then translate into his signature line." That signature line, swooping and evocative, could not be mistaken for the hand of any other, and so influential was Hirschfeld that, in Leopold's witty assessment, after he drew the Marx Brothers, the troupe "started to look more like Al's drawings, rather than the other way around." A favorite of Franklin Roosevelt and Frank Sinatra alike, Hirschfeld lampooned and japed, and though he tried his hand at serious worksome of his early pieces on display here resemble Chagall, while others clearly borrow from Gauguin and perhaps less clearly from Covarrubiasit is his whimsical show-business portfolio for which he is best remembered, and particularly his broad-stroke portraits of Laurel and Hardy, Milton Berle, and other stars of a bygone era. (Yet he kept himself current: two of Hirschfeld's final portraits portrayed Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and comedian Jerry Seinfeld.) As Leopold notes in this critical but by no means arid study of the art, Hirschfeld was extraordinarily prolific, completing more than 10,000 pieces over a long life. He was a "Zelig-like character in a good bit of cultural history of the twentieth century." He was good-natured about it, too, joking that he supported the capitalist system as a machine "so sloppily and benevolently conceived that even I could wind up owning a house." An intelligent, carefully representative look at Hirschfeld's work that ably shows why the artist deserves to be remembered today. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
