Word: penned
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...death, this comic muralist had left the fullest scrapbook of a century dominated by entertainment. He drew, and drew out the spirit of, thousands of celebrities from high art (Toscanini, Natalia Makarova) and popular art (Anna Magnani, Natalie Wood). Through his pen, inanity became animate, and the captious craft of caricature was raised to character study...
...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...
...consensus of those interviewed in "The Line King" is that Hirschfeld was a genial fellow who mingled freely with the subjects he scratched at, or caressed, with his pen. In as much as his illustration would typically be published while a show was in previews, and then he would attend the opening-night performance, he could hardly hide from the producers and angels. But why would he want to? Hirschfeld seemed perfectly at ease with himself, his work and his Great White World. He knew how hard it was to create a good play. In 1947 he had worked...
...Luddite; he was ever open to the Next Thing. As Anais Nin apostrophized to a lover in "Henry and June": "There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation." Hirschfeld was anti-stagnation too. Like his thin pen-lines, he was lithe, blithe and on the move...
...creator of an inadvertent history of 20th century entertainment was ready for the 21st. In "The Line King" we see him fiddling with computer drawing. At first he resists; then he gets the gang of it. "I suppose it's possible to control," he says of the mouse-pen. "It just requires another lifetime to do it, that's all." And he was game for that next lifetime. "Living is an art, you know, it's not a science. You make it up as you go along." Maybe Hirschfeld, who made it up while sitting in a barber chair...