Al Hirschfeld, Beyond Broadway
Exhibition

Betty Compson's (1897–1974) thirty-six year career as a performer began at age fifteen on the Vaudeville stage, where she was billed as the "Vagabond Violinist." By the early 1920's, she was on contract with Paramount and considered one of the era's top film stars. Compson and Al Hirschfeld probably crossed paths in the Hollywood studios where they both worked, at a time when, according to the artist, he was influenced by the "eye, ear, nose, and throat" drawings of Charles Dana Gibson.

If Hirschfeld were at the start of his career today he might gravitate toward the Internet. But the emerging media of his youth was film. As Art Director of Selznick Pictures, he supplied a wide variety of artwork, including this colorful piece for the film Woman to Woman, for the small studio with the big advertising budget.

Hirschfeld's first love has always been drawing, but early in his career he experimented with a number of graphic media. From 1925 to 1927 he flirted with etching, producing a number of plates, primarily of scenes from his trip to North Africa. In this practice plate, one of the earliest examples extant of his caricatures, he captured the images of performers he had already begun to draw for posters and advertisements.

Hirschfeld has spent a lifetime studying people, not nature. It is no surprise then that a man who sees the Grand Canyon as a “diseased molar, dramatically lit,” was fascinated by the people of Morocco while on a three-month trip to North Africa in 1926. This etching shows his developing attraction to personality as expressed through line.

Fleeing the cold of his first Parisian winter, on a trip to North Africa in 1926, Hirschfeld was exposed to the bright light and dark shadows of the region, which would soon change his life. Characteristically, Hirschfeld was drawn to an urban streetscape teeming with people for this composition.

In a series for New York Amusements, a free weekly publication listing current shows, Hirschfeld designed his drawings to feature a portrait of a performer alongside a scene from his or her current success. This line is influenced by the thin French line Hirschfeld discovered in Parisian illustrated magazines and in the work of noted American illustrator John Held, Jr., with whom he worked alongside at MGM's publicity department in the late 1920s.

At this stage of his career, Hirschfeld was more interested in design than in capturing the character of a performer. In this portrait of Jane Cowl the jagged line that Covarrubias frequently employed reveals the electricity of Cowl's performance. Cowl was a leading lady of the American theater in the 1920s and 1930s and she frequently starred in revivals of perhaps her greatest role, in Robert Sherwood's The Road to Rome.

Hirschfeld spent nearly six months in Russia in 1928. As an international correspondent to the New York Herald Tribune, he sent back reports of the theater and film companies he observed. Articles were illustrated with his drawings, frequently composite portraits of performers and their directors. Moscow's Blue Revue was a form of living newspaper, presenting a variety of acts based on current events. Performers were costumed so that part of the blue blouse—the uniform of the Russian worker—was always showing.

Hirschfeld “Hirschfelds” himself, applying his signature style to a self-portrait, as he has done periodically throughout his career. With great confidence and grace he employs sweeping abstract lines to define the upper body, animated shorter strokes to delineate an expression of bemused serenity.

In a 1938 exhibition catalogue George Grosz wrote, “I'm particularly struck by the excellence of his compositions in the print called 'Art and Industry,' where the lines radiating from the focal point of interest are successfully integrated without creating the effect of arid stylization. Only a master draughtsman could have accomplished this.”

Hirschfeld has said his 1932 trip to Bali “was decisive in clarifying my belief in the magic of pure line. The influence of line and caricature practiced by the masters of Bali and Orientals has remained with me to this day. Since the day I left Bali heading for Paris and eventually the USA, I have never had the slightest interest in watercolor or oil paint. The problem of placing the right line in the right place has absorbed all of my interests across these many years . . . I am still enchanted when an unaccountable line describes and communicates the inexplicable.”

In 1932, the year before Prohibition ended, Hirschfeld felt the need to record the place of speakeasies in history. Never a big drinker, he recalls, “I drank during Prohibition, but then it was a sign of patriotism.” His resulting book, Manhattan Oases, a collection of thirty-six drawings of bartenders, featured a foreword by Heywood Broun and a witty “Gentlemen's Guide to Bars and Beverages” edited by friend and screenwriter Gordon Kahn.

“In common with every other artist who rose above the rank of cretin,” Hirschfeld says, “I, too, had a genuine lithograph stone in my studio to work on.” He had studied at the County Council in London, and later in Paris, where he bought his own press. This print was so popular that when the original edition was sold out, Hirschfeld recreated the composition in a different format.

Al Hirschfeld employs sketchbooks to record the initial impressions that will define his finished work. In the sketchbook displayed, featuring sketches for a number of Broadway shows of the period, Hirschfeld made his preliminary studies for his second version of Nine Old Men of the Supreme Court.

Although a Republican, William H. Woodin supported Franklin Roosevelt for President and was made his secretary of the treasury in 1933. In this witty carving, the only known Hirschfeld work in this medium, the artist comments on Woodin's cabinet post, his role in the issuance of new money during the banking crisis of March 1933, and perhaps Woodin's hobby of numismatics.

In 1933, Hirschfeld edited the satiric magazine, Americana, with his friend and fellow artist Alexander King. Filled with drawings, photographs, and collages, many made by King, the publication was irreverent look at New York and the country. The editors assigned pages to artists to do whatever they wanted. If an artist did not submit a work for his page, the page was left blank.

In addition to the twenty-four lithographs in the book, Hirschfeld filled the pages of William Saroyan's foreword with pen-and-ink drawings of Harlem citizens, such as this family group. Harlem was a regular haunt for Hirschfeld, and he captures the neighborhood with great passion and affection.

Harlem As Seen by Hirschfeld is a limited edition volume of 20 color lithographs of Harlem and four more of Bali, published in 1941. Like his previous book, Manhattan Oases (1932, Dutton), it presents a slice of New York life inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and personalized by the artist.

From 1942 to 1954 covers of the American Mercury magazine frequently featured colorful caricature portraits of newsmakers by Hirschfeld. These works do not have the political intent of his political work in the 1930s, but are engaging summations of the public personas of the subjects.

Walter Lippmann was a highly respected columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, considered by many the most influential political commentator of the twentieth century. His opinions informed every president from Woodrow Wilson to Richard Nixon.

MGM gathered many of its greatest singers and dancers for this film biography of songwriter Jerome Kern. For the publicity campaign art, the studio turned to one of its other stars to create more than twenty caricature portraits of the performers. These drawings appeared on the film's posters, print advertisements, and soundtrack.

Hirschfeld's work has been a staple of the “Drama,” now “Arts and Leisure,” section of the New York Times since his first appearance in those pages in January 1928. His work also frequently appeared in the newspaper's magazine section in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the Book Review. During the 1970s, a number of his drawings appeared on the editorial pages of the paper including this portrait of Evangelist Billy Graham. Other op-ed portraits Hirschfeld drew at the time included Mao Tse-Tung, Spiro Agnew, and New York mayor John Lindsay.

As the New York Times introduced color into its pages, it has frequently asked Hirschfeld to supply paintings rather than drawings. Although he has drawn Liza Minnelli nearly twenty times in the last thirty-five years, in this recent work he creates a timeless, riveting summation of her style, evoking the lively, colorful caricatures of jazz greats he created for Seventeen magazine in the 1940s.

Despite the diverse sources for his art, Hirschfeld will always be linked to Broadway, a street and a way of life he knows well. Although there are now not nearly as many shows on the Great White Way as there were in Hirschfeld's youth, his drawings continually evoke the excitement of a performance. Each year, on the Sunday of the annual Tony Awards, the New York Times always presents a summation of the season past and, almost always, this lead story is accompanied by a Hirschfeld drawing. Philip Bosco and Claudia Shear grace this colorful composite portrait celebrating two great recent stage performances.