Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003), one of the world’s most iconic and recognized caricaturists, is renowned for his uncanny ability to capture his subjects’ facial features in only a few elegant and flowing elongated calligraphic lines. Ubiquitous for over eight decades, he came to embody caricature innovation with an insight, vision and command of technique that elevated the art from the slavish historically accepted act of graphic buffoonery to interpretive expressionism, and his drawings stand as one of the most innovative efforts in establishing the visual language of modern art in the 20th century.
His signature work appeared in virtually every major publication, including a 75-year relationship with The New York Times as its “house artist.” He was renowned for catching the spirit of his subjects with lines that, studied individually, might seem irrelevant but, taken together, added up to characteristic eyes, hairdos, and motions – all in such a way as to distill the essence of the subject’s character. His ultimate goal was never to merely draw a subject’s physical likeness or to exaggerate or distort his physical characteristics but, rather, to capture the essence of the subject’s character and, as such, he always rejected characterizations of him as a “caricaturist,” preferring to describe himself as a “characterist.”
Hirschfeld drew great imaginative portraits of the performing artists of his lifetime, particularly theater performers, and to be “Hirschfelded” – i.e., to be the subject of one of his drawings – endowed the subject a special cachet and fame. He claimed that he never editorialized in his theatre portraits because:
the character depicted is the character that was designed by the playwright… he is the one who is responsible for the hero and the villain, and the courtesan or the housewife depicted in the play, and all I’m doing is translating what he has invented to the viewer.
Hirschfeld, who maintained that he never found taking advantage of human anatomic perversions either amusing or entertaining, maintained that his caricatures were all done with good humor and were never mean-spirited. One critic cogently noted that his work never manifested “even a pen stroke of meanness.” However, not all his subjects were always pleased by his results. For example, in one famous case, he was commissioned by CBS to illustrate a preview magazine featuring the network’s new fall 1963 TV programming, including Candid Camera. The show’s host, Allen Funt, was so outraged by Hirschfeld’s depiction of him – which he said “made me look like a gorilla” – that he threatened to leave his show and the network if the magazine with his likeness was issued. (Hirschfeld displayed his great sense of humor when he told his editor that “I had nothing to do with the way Mr. Funt looks, that’s G-d’s work.”)
After his second marriage, to German actress and singer Dorothy (Dolly) Hass, and the birth of their daughter, Nina, in 1945, Hirschfeld’s covert insertion of “NINA” into his works, which he hid “in folds of sleeves, tousled hairdos, eyebrows, wrinkles, backgrounds, shoelaces, anywhere to make it difficult – but not too difficult – to find,” became a historic part of caricature lore. So popular did the “Ninas” become that the American military used them in the training of bomber pilots to help increase their map-reading and perceptual ability. (The artist was not pleased that his work was being used for warfare purposes.) He rued the day he had begun hiding the “Ninas” in his work and he desperately wanted to halt the practice, but he came to realize how addicted readers had become to the “Nina searches” when he purposely omitted the hidden name one Sunday, only to be besieged by complaints from angry and frustrated “Nina hunters.” In 1991, the United States Postal Service issued a booklet of five 29-cent stamps honoring comedians as designed by the artist and, contrary to its official policy banning the insertion of secret messages into American stamp designs, the U.S. Postal Service made an exception permitting Hirschfeld to insert his trademark Nina into the illustrations.
Hirschfeld gained fame not only for his sketches and artwork, but also for his theatre work as a “visual journalist,” which became as much part of the Broadway experience as opening night and essentially reinvented the art of the caricature. Whenever a new Broadway production was announced, he would avoid using available press photographs because, he said, they were “misleading;” instead, he would watch the performers on stage so that he could see them in motion and get a sense of their personalities. He trained himself to draw in a darkened theatre with certain “hieroglyphics,” marks that he could later interpret and apply to develop the finished product. (Later in his career, producers would sometimes send him videotapes, which he would use as additional means to watch the performers in motion.)
Although his caricatures remarkably conveyed the mood of the play and character of the actors, he never wrote theatre reviews, preferring to leave that to professional critics. He would often note his own failures at predicting the success of theatrical productions; for example, he believed that Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady, among the greatest Broadway smashes of all time, would be huge flops. He even participated in his own flop – it opened in New Haven and folded in Philadelphia, never even making it to Broadway – working on the libretto of Sweet Bye & Bye (1946), a comedy musical with lyrics by nonsense verse humorist Ogden Nash and music by Vernon Duke. On the other hand, following a visit to Thailand where he was permitted to film the rehearsals of the royal dancers, he brought the footage to Rogers and Hammerstein, which led to the all-time classic The King and I (1951).
For over seven decades, Hirschfield’s name became intimately connected to Broadway and New York, and his drawings not only made theatre attendees reminisce warmly about the shows they had seen, but also drew viewers to the theatres and entertained millions of people around the world who had never been to see a Broadway play. Since he began his theatre work so early in the 20th century, in some cases it constitutes the only historical record of long-lost shows and forgotten actors.
He also became renowned for his movie posters, which included five out of the original six posters for The Wizard of Oz and some iconic work for the Marx Brothers; for his work in publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker magazine, Collier’s, Playbill, Rolling Stone, and his all-time record production of forty covers for TV Guide.
Later in his career, Hirschfeld also became a pioneer in soundtrack record album cover design, with one of his earliest such works featured on the recording of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Other of his celebrated album covers include Guys and Dolls (1950), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Man of La Mancha (1966), and My Fair Lady (1964), in which he memorably illustrated playwright George Bernard Shaw – the author of Pygmalion (1913), from which Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe adapted My Fair Lady – in the clouds above manipulating stars Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews as marionettes.
Born in St. Louis, Hirschfeld was a descendant of a line of Orthodox Russian tailors and one of three sons of Isaac, a traveling salesman of German-Jewish descent, and Rebecca, a Russian-Jewish immigrant from a strictly Orthodox family. His Orthodox grandparents, who had settled in the small Jewish quarter in St. Louis, refused to eat in Issac and Rebecca’s non-kosher home. Hirschfeld went to a Jewish Sunday school in St. Louis and later in New York but, as he put it, his family’s Judaism was “a strange kind of religion.” For example, he discusses how his mother would not permit bread in the house on Passover and, while everyone would eat matzot, they would regularly eat matzah and ham sandwiches, which seemed senseless even to the young Hirschfeld, but his mother maintained that it was necessary to preserve certain religious practices, such as not eating bread on Passover, out of “respect” for Jewish traditions. The family would attend synagogue only on the occasion of a death, although Rebecca, who lit Shabbat candles every Friday night, would attend for the holidays and light yahrzeit candles in memory of her parents.
Perhaps as a result of what he himself characterized as his mother’s “made-up Judaism,” Hirschfeld rejected Orthodox Judaism. Nonetheless, he always believed that he belonged to a great heritage going back through centuries, and “I’ve always felt that I am very close to Jewish life, customs, food, even though I never attend synagogue. But I’ve never thought of myself as anything but Jewish.”
As a young boy in St. Louis he experienced antisemitism – and he would later tell a story he said he would never forget. The only Jew in his class, he was sitting in his classroom when the garbageman, “a stylized Jew, right out of Der Stuermer, with the peyes and the derby hat and the alpaca coat, sitting in his little wagon with the bells ringing,” passed by outside yelling “rags, bottles.” When his teacher mockingly said to him, “There goes your father,” he was so upset that he went to the front of the class and struck her. When his father was summoned to meet with the principal, Isaac refused to order his son to apologize, and instead he demanded that the teacher be suspended – which she was.
Hirschfield was an avid supporter of Israel, believing that Israel was invaluable to the security of every Jew:
We learned by experience that regardless of how you feel, and how American you feel, or how German you feel, or what you think of what you are, and you may consider yourself a loyal American, but when the chips are down, you’re a Jew and you have a place to run to. And that’s a very comforting and necessary thing for your peace of mind. I feel as close to Israel as I do to the country that I’m a fourth generation of, and that’s the United States. But I have that tie with Israel…
Asked about intermarriage and how he would respond to his child marrying someone out of the faith, he said
No feeling about that at all, since I married a Christian girl. I have no feeling about my daughter (Nina) marrying anyone that she would fall in love with, or find a way of making herself happy in this life. I’m not chauvinistic about being Jewish, and I’m not ashamed of it, but I don’t wear it as a crutch against the injustices of man. If it’s anti-human, I’m against it. And that’s why, I suppose, that I can’t follow the teachings of Judaism, except in a very broad sense…
Hirschfeld’s second wife, Dolly Haas, was a non-Jewish German-American Broadway actress best known for her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s film, I Confess (1953); she was a friend of the director, who cast her as Alma Keller, the wife of the janitor-murderer Otto Kellner. The couple were wed by a “rabbi” in Baltimore in 1943, Nina was born in 1945, and they remained wed for over half a century until her death in 1994. Ironically, her first husband was Jewish, and her awareness of the threat presented by the Nazis in Germany led her to immigrate to England in 1936.
Asked if being a Jew has made a difference in his life, Hirschfeld responded:
I suppose the difference is that when you are a minority you try a bit harder. You have a little more responsibility to improve your own plight and your fellow man’s. You’re not satisfied with being like – at least I’m not – other fellows, whatever his religion or politics are. But being a Jew implies a kind of introspection. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re better equipped than the average citizen, but there is a kind of tradition of scholarliness, of a deep love for knowledge that’s part of your heritage. It seems to me – I don’t think it’s accidental that all of the Jews that I have ever met have that one thing in common, their inordinate love for knowledge, and their compassion for their fellow man.
I don’t mean to denigrate the Christians but I don’t think there is the same thing… Jews that I know are mostly interested in humanity and themselves, and not in the Christian point of view…. I think that during the inquisition, they [Christians] never killed a Jew, they “saved” him. I think before they ran a needle through his heart, they spritzed him with holy water to “save” him. And I think they really believed they saved him. Well, I never want that kind of salvation. The salvation I want is myself, to save myself.
Isaac Hirschfeld rarely worked, and it was Rebecca who was the family breadwinner, working in department stores and later running her own candy store. At the suggestion of the doorman at the St. Louis art museum frequented by Hirschfeld – who befriended him, took him out sketching, and recognized the young boy’s talent – the family moved to New York City in 1914, where the young Al played in the same semi-pro baseball team as Lou Gehrig, but he gave up a possible future in professional baseball to pursue his interest in art.
Al Hirschfeld received his basic art training at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design and, by age 17, he was already earning good wages at Goldwyn Pictures working for Lionel Reiss, who specialized in Jewish subjects and whose work was exhibited in Jewish museums worldwide. After he was let go a few months later, he went to Universal Pictures, where he earned $75 a week, a substantial salary at that time, before leaving for Selznick Pictures where he made drawings for ads and posters and, at the ripe old age of 18, was made art director with authority over nine artists in the department. The company encouraged him to also open his own studio under contract to Selznick, and it invited him to hire some of the Selznick artists to work with him.
However, when Selznick went bankrupt in 1924, he was left bankrupt and owing significant sums of money to the artists he had hired. He paid them whatever he had, sold his studio, moved back in with his mother, took a job at Warner Brothers, and worked for a year and a half to make weekly payments to pay off all his outstanding debts to his artists. Having no direction and unsure about his future, he accepted $500 from his maternal uncle to travel to Paris (1924), which opened “a world of creativity and insanity” and enabled him to live a bohemian life and to study painting, drawing, lithography, and sculpture. At one point his poverty was such that he gave his treasured bar mitzvah watch to the landlord in lieu of rent, but his Bohemian friends chipped in and bought it back for him.
Arriving back in the United States with his watercolors, he held moderately successful shows in St. Louis, Chicago, and New York and, in 1928 he married his first wife, Florence Allyn. They honeymooned in Moscow where, as a correspondent for the Herald Tribune, he covered the Moscow theatre culture and wrote weekly pieces accompanying his drawings that were published weekly in the Sunday Tribune. Hirschfeld was very interested in the Soviet Union, which he then believed was “the salvation of the world.”
Back in Paris after spending some time in Iran, he again exhibited his watercolors (he did not exhibit his theatre caricatures until later because, he said, no one ever took them seriously, except himself). While acknowledging that perhaps he simply didn’t understand the highly complicated and technical advances that had been made in art, these advances left him cold and most of it seemed to him like “sheer nonsense.” After travels to Tahiti and Australia, he spent a year on the island of Bali in Indonesia, which had a seminal effect on his artistic development. He was deeply influenced by Balinese sculpture, painting and, in particular, their highly stylized drawing and use of elongated figures. It was in Bali that he began to look at people more linearly because the bright sun reduced everyone to simple lines, and it was there where he fortuitously met and befriended Charlie Chaplin, who purchased most of his watercolors, thereby enabling the broke artist to finally travel back to the United States.
Hirschfeld’s great breaks came in 1926, when one of his sketches was published by the Herald Tribune, followed by other commissions, and in 1927, when the New York Times commissioned him to do a portrait of Hollywood actor Harry Lauder, which led to him becoming the “house cartoonist” for the paper, although he rejected its every contract offer and insisted upon always operating as an independent contractor.
Less known is the fact that for a brief time in the late 1920s through the early 1930s, Hirschfeld was a left-wing political cartoonist who, inspired by Soviet propaganda artists (recall that he had spent time in Soviet Russia in 1927), published his work in The New Masses, a Communist paper. For example, in one drawing, he depicted Goebbels as an evil puppeteer manipulating strings attached to little figures of Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Neville Chamberlin. However, when the editors of the paper hypocritically refused to publish his cartoon critical of the crazed antisemitic televangelist Father Charles Coughlin because, they said, it might offend Catholic unions, he resigned in disgust. In any event, he would later note that he lacked the venom to take on politicians, preferring to concentrate on his gentle depictions of entertainers. However, he would occasionally draw mild caricatures of leading politicians and, by the request of FDR himself, his 1944 caricature of the president was added to the side of the U.S.S. Roosevelt and he was invited to the White House.
Susan Dryfoos’s documentary of Hirschfeld’s life, The Line King (1996) – the clever nickname she coined for him – was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His work appears in the collections of important museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney. He won a special Tony, a sign that the theater world welcomed him not only as an observer but also as one of its own.
Exhibited here is the program for Hirschfeld’s funeral ceremony, which was led by Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein of the Central Synagogue in New York. He was buried in the Kensico Cemetery in Westchester County, where many entertainment figures of the early twentieth century are buried, including Sergei Rachmaninoff and Lou Gehrig, Hirschfeld’s former teammate.
In late 2002, the owner of the Martin Beck Theatre announced that it would be renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in June 2003 to mark the artist’s 100th birthday. Sadly, Hirschfeld died on January 20, 2003 and never lived to see the rededication, which nevertheless took place on June 23, 2003. Exhibited here is the original June 23, 2003 Playbill celebrating “100 years of Al Hirschfeld” and marking the rededication of the Martin Beck Theatre in his name.
