Word: hirschfelds
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...People still go to first nights in their tuxedos and evening dresses, but these are duded-up dinosaurs; today's theater opening is the latest in a series of wakes. At one of these poignant occasions, filmed for Susan W. Dreyfoos' vivacious 1998 documentary "The Line King: Al Hirschfeld," fellow cartoonist Jules Feiffer rightly opined, "The only glamour left in the theater is what Al brings to it. And he is to what he does what Astaire was to what he did. Al has the same effortlessness, the same grace, the same wit, and that lighter-than-air quality." True...
...Hirschfeld was using an obsolete art (what newspaper printed drawings any more?) in the service of an obsolescent one (who goes to the theater?), his work never grew senescent. His hand was as firm and supple as ever, the late drawings an ever-more assured symphony of fine lines. "Draw lines, young man, many lines," the old painter Ingres had advised Edgar Degas in the 1850s. That's what Al did: kept filling the page with many lines, many people, lots of furniture, until the image was as cramped as the cabin in "A Night at the Opera...
...Hirschfeld's lines had snap and swing - movement, like a jump-rope at top speed. Millions of lines over 80 years, and not one had an inappropriate stroke. There was drama in the contrast of those black lines on a white page - a bit less when it was reprinted on the Times' gray newsprint. Which is why you should look at his work in book form: the handsomely illustrated autobiography "Hirschfeld On Line," or, for about the price of a manicure, the Gotham-glorifying "Hirschfeld's New York" and the all-movie "Hirschfeld's Hollywood...
...Caricaturists, whose pen is meaner than the sword, are supposed to believe that cruelty is an inalienable right. Hirschfeld didn't hold to that creed. Or maybe his pen and his personality were too ebullient to be bilious; the Nast or nasty drawing, he seemed to think, didn't demean the subject so much as the artist. He had an inability to find the jugular in a entertainment figure. He did go for the jungular, exaggerating facial features and specializing in a kind of reverse anthropomorphism: he turned men into beasts. To Mickey Rooney, Bert Lahr and Zero Mostel...
...malevolent Santa Claus, complete with bell, book and candle. Merrick's reaction: he bought the drawing and used it as his Christmas card. Seen today, that sketch has an eerie resemblance to a certain artist's early self-portraits - for this Merrick looks like the younger, saturnine Al Hirschfeld...