Reviewer James Stern of the New York Times
Nonfiction
E'er Leave Them Smiling: The Art of Al Hirschfeld
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HIRSCHFELD
The Biography
By Ellen Stern
It'due south incommunicable, unless y'all're blind or a LeRoy Neiman collector, to face a work past Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) without sneaking one more furtive squint at the perfection of line that flowed so fluidly from his crow quill pen. Looping, swooping arabesques, bodies sinuously elongated and twisted, never a graceless line — almost every Broadway star from Sacha Guitry, his first, to Tommy Tune, his last, is rendered in centre-stabbingly valid likenesses halfway between pattern and portraiture.
Xviii years later on his expiry, Ellen Stern has written a book simply titled "Hirschfeld," wrapped around the art of the man widely celebrated as the greatest caricaturist of the 20th century. No small laurels for an artist most every bit versatile as a Swiss Guard: Simply specialization appears to pay, in medicine, football and extravaganza. Hirschfeld lionized thespians almost exclusively, and and so inimitably that he never heard footsteps. (The sole genius caricaturist he was not. Take the art beyond theatrical personages and there's the late David Levine, whose dark, witty, exquisitely fine ink-line drawings brand a grab.)
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Equally the author recounts, Al Hirschfeld arrived in New York from his native St. Louis in 1912 equally barely more than a kid who liked to describe. He liked it so much, and was and so good at information technology, that by age eighteen he was the art managing director for Selznick Pictures, cutting his teeth illustrating film posters. He sold his first newspaper caricature at 21 and never looked back. Hirschfeld spent the next three-quarters of a century steadily improving his position. He died a whisker short of his 100th birthday. And used every twenty-four hour period of it, working with such trigger-happy dedication that the Hirschfeld oeuvre bulks out today at x,000 drawings.
He but got more than accomplished as he matured. But it'due south hardly as if Hirschfeld were content to sit in that spavined former barber's chair up in his East Side aerie, sealed off from the wider world. Much as he loved art, as Stern tells united states of america, it wasn't plenty to forgo life's other pleasures. For instance, he takes up foreign travel equally soon equally he can. He'due south a talented watercolorist and dreams of a serious painting career. A sympathetic uncle gives him $500 to study art away and he's gone.
Paris, 1925: Hirschfeld and a couple of chums rent themselves a studio.
He revels in the fizz of '20s Paris. All around him, expat writers and artists and musicians — the kind of people one seldom found back in St. Louis. The toll of living makes cheap seem expensive; Hirschfeld's share of a year's rent is $33. So wintertime turns the studio into a alive-in refrigerator. A brief holiday in southern climes, and then back to New York, piling up assignments for the movies and the stage. So much for the painting career.
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Hard, about nonstop work smoothed out caricatures. They lost their baby fat. He spent much of the '30s mercilessly carving every drawing downwards to its purest form. He was married now and partook zealously in the Manhattan social caravansary. A brief romance with the fairy tale of Russian Communism; world travels that found him in Bali at the same time as Charlie Chaplin, kindling a fast friendship; writing a theatrical flop with Southward. J. Perelman, another friend: Hirschfeld'due south life was as full as a Broadway show. He was still maintaining a decorated stride at 90. Maybe God gave him a suspension: The shaky drawing hand and dulled imagination of a codger are absent-minded.
Stern, who has written for New York mag and GQ, doesn't flinch from the flaws and failures behind that gruff visage and Moses beard. Hirschfeld's first two marriages grind to ugly halts, generating much friction; his third, to the High german-built-in actress Dolly Haas, produced his but kid, Nina, whose name became a game: Find where that slyboots Hirschfeld has hidden information technology in every new drawing. Nina was non amused. The self-captivated, emotionally afar Hirschfeld resisted the office of a dad. Nina reacted erratically to her exclusion from his affection. Stern exhaustively traces her blighted life in this begetter-daughter relationship that never jelled.
Hirschfeld worked in colour: more than than a hundred Tv Guide covers; no cultural snob, he. But this attribute of his work hides in the shadow of those more than famed black-and-white caricatures in The New York Times. He avoided loading personal judgments or biases into his piece of work and wouldn't telephone call himself a caricaturist because he felt that it licensed criticism and ridicule. (He preferred "characterist," which mercifully, like the Interrobang and Esperanto, never caught on.) The passionate humanist liberal Hirschfeld well-nigh never lent his name or fame fifty-fifty to urgent skilful causes. It'southward tough to man the barricades when you're trying to illustrate the charms of "My Fair Lady" or the brio of "Hullo, Dolly!" or the slapstick comedy of "A Funny Affair Happened on the Way to the Forum."
Stern'southward book is thoroughly researched and her prose lump-free. She clearly stayed upwards late doing her homework. (How the hell did she ever dig up the fact that Hirschfeld not only played semipro baseball early on in his New York days, just did and so alongside Lou Gehrig?) Skilful for her, good for Al Hirschfeld, of whom there will never be some other. Fifty-fifty before the pandemic, the elegant theater milieu in which he thrived had all but dried up and diddled away. Broadway is condign a suburb of Hollywood. People no longer dress upwardly for an evening on the Rialto. And it's all besides safe a bet that a miserably small fraction of those who volition soon exist milling around inside the Al Hirschfeld Theater could tell you lot who Al Hirschfeld was.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/books/review/hirschfeld-the-biography-ellen-stern.html
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