I can’t remember when I wasn’t familiar with Al Hirschfeld’s artwork. My dad managed a radio station in Michigan and received tons of unsolicited albums from record companies who hoped for some air play. Most of these LPs didn’t fit the station’s format, so the staff got to take them home. We ended up with a hefty collection of them in the den. Some in the mix featured sleek, cool artwork. I’d stare at those closely, including the soundtracks for My Fair Lady and Man of La Mancha.
Those lines! That wit! My Fair Lady… look at the puppetry of the puppet. Come on… that’s “Being John Malkovich” territory, that’s what that is. And the master puppet-master? God? Well, sort of… George Bernard Shaw, actually, the guy who wrote the story that “Lady” was based on, “Pygmalion.” Wit galore in that drawing. LAYERS of wit.
Then there was this tour-de-force, the cover of “This Is Broadway’s Best”:
Give it up, man. Dick Gautier as Birdie, with the sneer and the boots and the hip thrust and the swooning chicks. More Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews from My Fair Lady. And… AND two times the Mary Martin: one blonde in Austria, one brunette, in drag. Here’s a better look at the art:
So sophisticated. So minimal-yet-detailed. Perfect jawlines on the ecstatic girls and the hoodlum marrying the Puerto Rican girl. Birdcage and phonograph in an Edwardian study, and a cornball square haircut in a Shakespeare-based musical, Kiss Me Kate (see upper-right duo). Even as a tyke I knew that dude’s haircut was bogus. Bothered me.
Anyway, Al Hirschfeld… You can see the integrity. He transcended the genre of caricature art. In the documentary “The Line King” (by Susan Warms Dryfoos), Hirschfeld recalls an editor telling him to draw more conventionally. Hirschfeld—young as he was at the time—answered indignantly something like, “There’s no WIT in that. YOU want an ear-eye-nose-and-throat man. I quit.” Integrity, vision and guts. AND the guy drove his Caddy to the theater well into his 90’s. From the Upper East Side to Broadway in a 90-foot Cadillac, during rush hour in Manhattan.
Al Hirschfeld, ladies and gentlemen! Al Hirschfeld.
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