Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld honored

NEW YORK, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, so-called chairman of the drawing board, has just been accorded exhibitions on both coasts for documenting the glitterati of New York and Hollywood's entertainment worlds for seven decades in deft pen-and-ink portraits that have achieved the status of art.

Still working at 98 (he'll be 99 on June 21), Hirschfeld's only concession to age is use of a wheelchair to save a gimpy leg from wear and tear. His witty but never cruel caricatures, which he prefers to call drawings, appear regularly in the New York Times arts and entertainment pages, just as they have for the past 73 years, and he has no intention of slowing down.

A selection of his work relating to the Broadway and Off-Broadway theater, opera and dance is on exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York through Jan. 27 and a comparable exhibit of work relating to film is in its last days at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, Calif.

The shows have inspired publication of two lavishly illustrated softcover books, "Hirshfeld's New York" and "Hirshfeld's Hollywood" (Harry N. Abrams, 96 pages each, $15.95), but showbiz enthusiasts might prefer to own an original Hirschfeld. One can be purchased from a large selection at the Margo Feiden Gallery on Madison Avenue, the only gallery in the city devoted to a single artist.

It was Feiden's idea to merchandize Hirschfeld's work more than 30 years ago, and she has been so successful that the artist -- who always lived comfortably from his work for the Times, Life magazine, and other publications -- is now a wealthy man as well as a famous one. His best work fetches $3,500 and up, lithographs and etchings start at $750, and he does portrait commissions for $8,600.

His self-portrait in the New York show, sketched in 1954, shows the bearded, heavily-browed artist at his drawing board in his home studio, perched on an old barber chair from which he has worked for more than 50 years. His beard is whiter today, but his brows are still dark, giving him the look of a beneficent satyr from whom the world has no secrets.

And indeed his world, the performing arts, has no secrets he does not know, for he has been an active part of it, sketching and getting to know the cast of almost every Broadway show of merit. He is the eternal first nighter at the theater, regular fixture at Sardi's restaurant, and dinner host to many a theater luminary at the comfortable upper East Side town house he has shared with his late first wife, actress Dolly Haas, and his art curator second wife, Louise.

When the Living Landmark of New York City award was established by the City Landmarks Commission, he was one of the first to receive it. Hirschfeld also is inordinately proud of having been given a special Tony Award in 1983 for his contributions to the Broadway theater and a Library of Congress "Living Legend Award" two years ago.

He is the first to admit that he has come a long way since he made his first newspaper drawing, a portrait of French actor Sacha Guitry, for the New York Herald Tribune in 1926.

The St. Louis-born artist had gotten his big break five years before when, after studying at the National Academy of Design and the Arts Student League in New York, he got a job as art director for Selznick Pictures Corporation in Fort Lee, N. J., before the company's move to Hollywood. He began doing promotional sketches of studio stars in a style influenced by popular illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and John Held Jr., the caricaturist of the jazz age.

He also took cues from the crisp style of Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican artist who contributed to Vanity Fair and the New Yorker magazine and shared a studio with Hirschfeld. Gradually his drawing took the form it has today, an instantaneously recognizable style based on continuous, unbroken lines that encapsulate form and movement in the curving loops of arabesques or complex squiggles.

"The problem of placing the right line in the right place has absorbed all of my interest across the years," Hirschfeld told UPI. "I am still enchanted when an unaccountable line describes and communicates the inexplicable."

Since the birth of his daughter, Nina, in 1945, he has been concealing her name in the squiggles in each drawing and has included a numeral of how many times the name has been included (three in his caricature of "The Producers"). Finding the Ninas has become a game with New York Times readers almost as popular as the Times crossword puzzle.

Hirschfeld hasn't limited himself to the theater scene, however. He has depicted the Empire State Building, the Trinity Church burial yard, Greenwich Village, Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, the subway, Zabar's food emporium, and the Algonquin Hotel's famous literary roundtable. He was the author of several books about New York including "Manhattan Oases" about the bar scene during Prohibition and "Harlem as Seen by Hirshfeld."

His Hollywood years encompassed employment at seven studios, and his artwork took the form of posters promoting films and illustrated film programs that did much to define the personas of such personalities as Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. He supplied the artwork for such classics as "The Wizard of Oz," "Cabin in the Sky," "Singing in the Rain," "National Velvet," and "Pygmalion."

His association with the moving picture industry continued in the 1930s and 1940s, when his art was used to publicize comedies and musicals, and into the 1970s when he did work illustrating a number of independently produced films. Among his most recent major Hollywood caricatures was a 1994 drawing of the founders of Dreamworks and a 1999 depiction of the year's Oscar winners.

Since 1943, Hirschfeld's relationship with the Times has been exclusive although he has never had a contract. He likes to boast that the agreement was made with a handshake with the publisher, a classy way for an undeniably classy man to seal a deal.