Hirschfeld was born in St. Louis in 1903. When he was 11 years old an art teacher informed his mother, "There is nothing more that we can teach him in St. Louis." The family moved forthwith to New York. Soon he was enrolled at the Art Students' League. Hirschfeld has never had to convince anyone that he's a genius; it's always been apparent.
By the ripe old age of 17, when most contemporaries were learning how to sharpen pencils, Hirschfeld was the art director at Selznick Pictures. He held the position for about four years. During this time, in 1923, his first published caricature appeared in the old WORLD magazine. In 1924 Hirschfeld moved to Paris to work, lead the Bohemian life, and grow a beard. The beard, Hirschfeld says, is the result of living in a cold-water flat. This he has retained -- the beard, not the flat -- for the past 60 years. Presumably because you never know when your oil burner will go on the fritz.
In 1943, Hirschfeld married one of Europe's most famous actresses, the great Dolly Haas. Their marriage is the happiest I've seen; in addition, it produced their daughter, Nina. Hirschfeld has engaged in the "harmless insanity," as he calls it, of hiding her name at least once in each of his drawings. The number of NINAs concealed is shown by an arabic numeral to the right of his signature. Generally if no number is found either NINA appears once or the drawing was executed before she was born.
(Several years ago, an NYU student kept coming into the Gallery to stare at the same drawing every day for a week. Curiosity finally got the best of me, and I asked, "What is so riveting about the drawing that keeps you here for hours, day after day?" She answered that she had found only 11 of the 39 NINAs and would not give up until were all located. I replied that the '39 next to his signature was the year (Nina was born in 1945).
It's interesting, I think, that although Hirschfeld was initially attracted to sculpture and painting, this gave way to his passion for pure line. "Sculpture," he once told me, "is a drawing you trip over in the dark."
I believe that Hirschfeld's devotion to line comes from yet a more fundamental aesthetic: his respect for absolute simplicity. One day soon after we first met, I asked, "Sometimes you do a drawing inspired by a complex play with elaborate scenery, extravagant costumes, and a cast of thousands, yet the drawing is simple. Other times the play is simple with a straight forward set, and costumes that are street clothes, yet the drawing is complicated. Is it that when you have time you do a complex drawing and when you're rushed you do a simple one?"
"No," he replied. "When I'm rushed I do a complicated drawing. When I have the time, I do a simple one."
In August of 1991, Al Hirschfeld became the first artist in history to have his name on a U.S. Postage Stamp Booklet when the United States Postal Service released the five stamps they commissioned Hirschfeld to design. The stamps portray Laurel & Hardy, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Abbott and Costello, and Fanny Brice. The stamps were issued in books of 20, with four sets each of the five Hirschfeld designs.
In November 1991, Hirschfeld's newest book, Hirschfeld: Art & Recollections From Eight Decades (Charles Scribner's Sons) was published to stunning reviews. A limited number of hand-signed copies are available at The Margo Feiden Galleries.
Al Hirschfeld's work is in The Smithsonian Institute, The National Portrait Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of the City of New York, The Lincoln Center Library, The Brooklyn Museum, The Fogg Museum of Harvard University, St. Louis Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and many other museums and institutions in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Since 1969, Al Hirschfeld has been represented exclusively by The Margo Feiden Galleries, where 70 years of his drawings, etchings, and lithographs are on permanent exhibition.
Copyright 1983 by The Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd., New York
