Artist of the day: Artist of the day, May 23: Al Hirschfeld, an American caricaturist (#700)

Albert Hirschfeld (1903 – 2003) was an American caricaturist best known for his black and white portraits of celebrities and Broadway stars appearing in The New York Times.

Hirschfeld’s family moved from St. Louis to upper Manhattan in New York City when he was 11, and at age 17 he went to work as the art director of Selznick Studios in the city’s Astoria district. With money saved, he went to Europe in 1924 to study art, residing mostly in Paris in the 1920s but returning often to New York City. In 1925 a Hirschfeld caricature drawn on a theatre Playbill was reproduced by The New York Herald Tribune. After his work became more popular and was published in several New York newspapers, he entered into an agreement with The New York Times in 1929 for the use of his theatre caricatures, and his drawings appeared in the newspaper up until his death. Following the birth of his daughter, Nina, he began hiding her name in the drawings and it became something of a pastime for readers to discover how many times her name appeared. (His work of theatrical and nontheatrical personalities continued to appear in numerous other publications.) In the 1930s he took a long trip to the Far East, where Japanese and Javanese art is said to have influenced his graphic style.

Beginning in the 1940s, Hirschfeld illustrated books by such authors as S.J. Perelman (Westward Ha! [1948], Swiss Family Perelman [1950]), Fred Allen (Treadmill to Oblivion [1954]), and Brooks Atkinson (The Lively Years [1973]); and he also began producing books of which he was both author and illustrator, such as Show Business Is No Business (1951) and Hirschfeld by Hirschfeld (1979). In The World of Hirschfeld (1968) he wrote extensively about his life and technique. Hirschfeld’s drawings, watercolours, lithographs, etchings, and sculptures are to be found in both private and museum collections. Although his caricatures were noted for their wit, Hirschfeld was not malicious, and it became something of an honour to be drawn by him.

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