The Hirschfeld Century: Portrait of an Artist and His Age
Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) picked the right hundred years. His was a century dominated by the rise of a media culture based on personality, and no one captured the defining characteristics of star personalities better than he did. A recent publication by Alfred A. Knopf offers a retrospective look at the life and work of Hirschfeld. With editing and text by David Leopold, The Hirschfeld Century: Portrait of an Artist and His Age is now available. xxxxx
From the 1920s to the turn of the 21st Century, Al Hirschfeld’s drawings of the famous captured the essential “brand” of their character. In his wonderful new book, Hirschfeld’s long-time archivist David Leopold unfolds Hirschfeld’s 82-year career in 366 works, arguing rightly that his art stands as an illuminating 
chronicle of an “American Century” defined by media and popular culture.
Right: ‘Another Fine Mess’ (1930)
Hirschfeld’s primary gift was to capture “graphic summations” of his subjects; he never resorted to exaggerating bits of anatomy because “it isn’t witty or sensible.” He considered himself a “characterist” more than a “caricaturist,” and as Leopold notes, “The satire of his art was more a slap on the back than a spit in the eye.”
Born in St. Louis in 1903, Hirschfeld showed such great artistic promise that his family relocated to New York City when he was twelve so that he could study at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. He actually began his career in his teens by illustrating movie posters. By 21, he was the art director at Selznick Pictures, and then worked at other studios as the movie industry burgeoned. Leopold writes that drawing movie posters is how 
Hirschfeld developed his eye-grabbing style: “The image had to be transmitted immediately as one passed the theater, and therefore had to be rendered as simply as possible.”
Left: ‘Edward R. Murrow’ (1956)
Working in years when modern media culture emerged, Hirschfeld was drawn to personality as the focus of his work. As mass media exploded in movies, radio, and print formats, the “personality” of star power ruled: personality is what sold at the box office. Leopold writes that Hirschfeld decided that star-power caricature “was a perfect approach to delineate that personality” because it instantly imparted a celebrity’s image and connected it to the viewer. Hirschfeld’s career flourished, Leopold notes, as caricature became “a perfect logo” for the decade that roared.
Hirschfeld particularly enjoyed drawing such early comics as Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy. What evolved, and why Hirschfeld
had such a lasting impact, was that his caricatures had a trademark quality that “became the image the public figure was striving to become.”
Right: ‘Liza Minnelli in Minnelli on Minnelli’ (1999)
During the Depression, Hirschfeld worked on Broadway with the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Marc Blitzstein, and many involved with the Federal Theatre Project. But the money was in Hollywood in the Thirties, and movies were becoming America’s dominant entertainment. Hirschfeld went West and became identified most closely with MGM, the glamour studio with “more stars than there are in heaven.” When he 
drew the Marx Brothers for their first film, A Night at the Opera (1935), Leopold writes that “a funny alchemy happened. The Marx Brothers started to look more like Al’s drawings,” and even “tried to conform to Al’s image.”
Left: Self Portrait (1993)
After the war, American entertainment changed. Hollywood’s “golden age” wound down as the studio system was broken up by antitrust court rulings, and new postwar audiences searched for newer faces that were “larger than life.” Broadway, however, surged to center stage, both in the dramatic works of such rising playwrights as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and in the dynamic world of musical theater, which soared in the works of Rodgers & Hammerstein, 
Lerner & Loewe, and Leonard Bernstein. Hirschfeld captured such great new stage stars as Marlon Brando and Mary Martin, but his attention was also taken by the new entertainment medium that emerged as a central player: television.
Right: ‘Milton Berle’ (1959)
Television invented its own stars, and Hirschfeld caricatured some of them in colorful gouache-on-board portraits for the cover of TV Guide, including Liberace and Alfred Hitchcock. But his first love was “the line,” and he always moved toward increasing simplification of his drawings. By the 1980s, he would explain, “All I know is to keep paring it down, eliminating, until its pure line that communicates.” He kept his signature “Ninas” hidden in his drawings as a playful tip-of-the-hat to his daughter, but his overall striving was
for increasing clarity and simplification.
Left: ‘Ella Fitzgerald’ (1993)
In a recent interview, David Leopold emphasized how “present-minded” Hirschfeld was—he lived in the present and happily “outsourced his past” to David as his archivist. As he explains in this beautifully-illustrated book, Leopold believes that we are now entering into the “Jane Avril phase” of Hirschfeld’s career. Today, we only now know this performer through Toulouse-Lautrec’s work. Similarly, Leopold argues, “The number of people who have seen Carol Channing in performance in such roles as Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! is decreasing, alas. By the next generation, they may know her as much by her 
Hirschfeld drawings as by any audio-or videotape or photograph….Like Lautrec’s Avril, Hirschfeld’s Channing distills her magic into graphic terms that speak across the years.”
Right: ‘Carol Channing in Hello Dolly‘ (1964)
Hirschfeld accrued many honors in his long career, including the National Medal of Arts. His work is included in the collections of such major museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Portrait Gallery. He is probably best known for the caricatures that were a half-page feature of the Sunday New York Times, with his last one (of Tommy Tune) appearing in December 2002. He was working on a commission of the Marx Brother when he died on January 20, 2003—an ending that seems absolutely perfect.
By Amy Henderson, Contributing Writer
David Leopold, THE HIRSCHFELD CENTURY: Portrait of an Artist and His Age (Alfred A. Knopf: NY, 2015) 320 pages, $40.