Al Hirschfeld

Caricaturist of 'genius' who recorded 75 years of Broadway

Albert Hirschfeld, caricaturist: born St Louis, Missouri 21 June 1903; married 1927 Florence Hobby (marriage dissolved 1939), 1943 Dolly Brahm (née Haas, died 1994; one daughter), 1996 Louise Kerz; died New York 20 January 2003.

Al Hirschfeld redefined the art of caricature and achieved world fame as a visual historian of Broadway in the 20th century. Jules Feiffer once said, "His drawings are to caricature what Fred Astaire was to dance", and Lauren Bacall called him "a national treasure".

From the 1920s until his death, Hirschfeld chronicled Broadway and its stars with insight and wit, but his work was not confined to show business. He drew world leaders and political figures – he worshipped Franklin Roosevelt, though on meeting him found him vain. He did notable colour lithographs of subjects such as Harlem (for a book published in 1941), "rhythm", and the Kabuki theatre of Japan.

His first sketch appeared in a New York paper in 1926, and he was theatre caricaturist for the New York Times Drama Section from 1929 to just last month, covering the city's plays and musicals for over 70 years. He witnessed Broadway's "coming of age" with the plays of Eugene O'Neill and the musical Show Boat, and drew all the era's larger-than-life personalities, from Chaplin, Keaton and Garbo to the Beatles, Streisand and Madonna. He designed posters for MGM during their greatest years, and those for the films of the Marx Brothers and such movies as Cabin in the Sky and the star-laden Till the Clouds Roll By are now prized collectors' items. He drew the stars of opera, classical music and dance in a fluid style that could capture the breathtaking movement of Baryshnikov as perceptively as he could catch the essence of personality.

Hirschfeld would also concoct intriguingly fanciful gatherings. Behind the grand piano in his living room he drew a panoramic mural of Marlene Dietrich, Bernard Shaw, Clark Gable, Tallulah Bankhead and Albert Einstein, all former friends, now guests at an imaginary soirée. A 1958 drawing of Harry's Bar in Venice shows the artist himself coming through the door to join Orson Welles, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway and Truman Capote. One of his best-known sketches adorns the record album of My Fair Lady, depicting Bernard Shaw operating Higgins like a puppet, who in turn is pulling Eliza's strings.

His trademarks were an amusing exaggeration of familiar features – Judy Garland's fedora over one eye, Gwen Verdon's animated hips, Ann Miller's legs and shoulders, Marlene Dietrich's pursed lips, Sean Connery's expressive eyebrows ("like an eagle's wingspan") – and the inclusion in nearly every drawing since 1945 of his daughter's name, Nina.

Though his work was irreverent and revealing, it was never malicious. "Making a big nose bigger is not witty," he once said. In fact he deliberately underemphasised the noses of both Jimmy Durante and Barbra Streisand. The critic Tom Rubin described "the Rorschach-like experience of suddenly discovering, say, that Carol Channing's nose and mouth can be perfectly represented by an umlaut hovering over a parking-meter dial". Channing, who holds the record as the personality most drawn by Hirschfield, claims that his early renderings of her practically invented her stage "character", while the eccentric dancer Ray Bolger paid him his highest tribute. "I now imitate the drawing," he said.

Hirschfeld said,

I'm most interested in design and pure drawing and I let the wit and satire fall where they may. Art definitions bore me. I don't know where classic art ends and caricature begins. El Greco and Picasso are my favourite caricaturists.

Albert Hirschfeld was born in 1903 in St Louis, Missouri, the year before the World's Fair was held there. His father was a salesman and his mother ran a candy store. By the age of five Al was drawing portraits of his schoolteachers that were exhibited on notice boards. When he was nine he was given lessons and taken to art galleries by a local artist, on whose advice the Hirschfelds moved to New York in 1915. There he studied art at the National Academy, and learned lithography at the Art Student's League.

Hired to work in the art department of the Samuel Goldwyn Studios, he was spotted by the advertising manager, Howard Dietz (later a famed lyricist), who asked him to do a drawing of the actress Louise Fazenda for an advertisement. Other such assignments were followed by a move to Selznick Pictures as art director.

Though his original ambition was to be a sculptor, at the age of 21 he travelled to Europe to become a painter. After studying in London he moved to Paris, where he shared a small house on Rue Vavin with the British artists Roger Furse (who would later design for Olivier) and Robert Musgrave. Because they had only cold water, he grew a beard, which he was to sport for the rest of his life. To earn money, he and Furse would entertain at a café, Furse playing the ukulele and Hirschfeld tap dancing.

He later said that during his Left Bank days in Paris he went through a strongly proletarian period and his first ventures into caricature were mostly political. During the Twenties and Thirties he was a regular contributor (without pay) to the left-wing journal New Masses. When they refused to print his cartoon of the notorious Fascist and anti-Semite Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest, because they felt it would offend Catholic trade unionists, he broke with them, and later confessed that he was "closer to Groucho Marx than to Karl".

Hirschfeld said that he was 23 years old when he discovered "the image of pure line" that was to be his forte. A trip to Bali had reinforced his love of Polynesian art and Javanese puppets, but his prime influence was the Japanese master Hokusai:

Most of my paintings were really drawings in colour, and my drawings were really sketches for paintings. Neither had form or made much sense. My real sense of satisfaction was the image of pure line, the simpler the better.

He returned to New York in 1926, and while watching Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps perform on Broadway in Guitry's musical play Mozart he started scribbling a likeness of Guitry on his playbill. His companion, the press agent Richard Maney, was impressed enough by the sketch to send it to the New York Herald Tribune. It became Hirschfeld's first published theatre drawing when the paper put it into their edition of 26 December 1926.

Hirschfeld soon found himself supplying theatre drawings for several of the city's then abundant daily papers, though he spent most of 1927 in Moscow as theatre correspondent for the Herald Tribune:

They were having a revolution in everything over there during this time. Stanislavsky, of course, was still the biggest name in the theatre, and Sergei Eisenstein was making as big a noise in silent films. I had hoped to publish a book of my drawings and observations, but the manuscript, including the illustrations, was lost by the publisher.

He made his début in The New York Times in 1928 with a drawing of my great-uncle the Scottish comedian Harry Lauder, who was giving one of his many "farewell performances", and from 1929 his work graced the front page of the paper's Drama Section after a handshake agreement that was not formalised into a contract until 1990. He was also given carte blanche to draw whomever or whatever he chose about a show. (He adamantly refused to put a helicopter into his drawing for Miss Saigon, stating that a machine can never be the star of a Broadway musical.)

Having seen virtually every play or musical that opened on Broadway during the rest of his lifetime, Hirschfeld probably went to more shows than anyone in the history of the theatre. He became a familiar figure at rehearsals and at first nights, and had developed a method of sketching and making shorthand notations from his aisle seat in the dark. He became a great friend of the Times's theatre critic Brooks Atkinson, and in 1973 the pair collaborated on a book surveying a half-century of Broadway, The Lively Years, 1920-1973. Many theatre personalities became friends. "It's kind of a mutual admiration society," he said of his closeness to players such as Helen Hayes and Jason Robards. "I like to draw them, they like to be drawn. They like my drawings, I like their acting."

A self-confessed "stage-door johnny" in his early days, Hirschfeld married a chorus girl from Earl Carroll's Vanities, Florence Hobby, in 1927. The marriage was dissolved in 1939 and in 1943 he married the actress Dolly Haas, remembered for her touching performance with Emlyn Williams in the 1936 film Broken Blossoms (that film's director John Brahm was her first husband), and her portrayal of a killer's wife in Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess.

In 1945 their daughter Nina was born, and to commemorate the fact Hirschfeld incorporated her name into his work. What started as "an innocent prank and a family joke" became a national pastime, for when he tried to discontinue the practice there was a howl of protest from his admirers. Ever since, the seeking of hidden "Nina"s has been a regular Sunday parlour game for the artist's admirers.

Dolly died in 1994, and two years later Hirschfeld married Louise Kerz, a theatre archivist, who described his working methods:

He first creates a full pencil drawing, complete with every detail, including perspective lines. In fact, the intent of the drawing is fully realised in the pencil draft before being refined and simplified with pen and ink. The pencil lines are then erased, leaving the magic of the black line.

Hirschfeld's friends included Eugene O'Neill, with whom he would visit speakeasies to hear jazz two or three times a week in the Thirties, and George and Ira Gershwin, to whom he introduced an unknown pianist, Oscar Levant, whom he had discovered playing in a small club in Greenwich Village. Marlene Dietrich would have breakfast with him when visiting her grandson, who was his neighbour on the Upper East Side. His closest friend was the humorist S.J. Perelman, and in 1947 the pair collaborated on a musical, The Sweet Bye and Bye, with a score by Vernon Duke and Ogden Nash. It was such a disaster that Hirschfeld swore never to work in the theatre again. "It's insanity," he said. He and Perelman than embarked on a world tour. Afterwards, in his memoir of the trip, Westward Ha! (1948), Perelman described the artist as "a remarkable combination of Walt Whitman, Lawrence of Arabia and Moe, my favourite waiter at Lindy's".

Over 30 years ago Hirschfeld's work began to achieve a higher profile after the art dealer Margo Feiden became his agent and opened a gallery devoted to his work. It became a favourite calling point for his admirers from all over the world, but in 2000 he sued Feiden, accusing her of cheating him. The lawsuit was later dropped, and the pair signed a new contract with the artist retaining control of the exhibition of his work.

Hirschfeld received two Tony Awards – a special award in 1975 and the Brooks Atkinson Award in 1984. In 1991 the US Post Office commissioned him to draw five stamps devoted to comedians, and set a precedent by allowing him to incorporate his trademark "Nina"s. In 1994 he designed a similar set depicting silent-screen stars. In 1996, Susan Dryfoos's The Line King, a documentary about Hirschfeld, was nominated for an Oscar, and among those who credit his influence are the artists for Disney – he was the acknowledged inspiration for both the Genie in Aladdin and the Gershwin sequence in Fantasia 2000.

Al Hirschfeld's work now hangs permanently in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and many other institutions. The playwright Arthur Miller said that people in a Hirschfeld drawing

all share the one quality of energetic joy in life that they all wish they had in reality . . . He makes all these people look interesting.

Brooks Atkinson said he was a "genius":

He has created an individual style that has not become a stereotype over the years. The style never takes precedence over the material. His use of line has never become mechanical.

Hirschfeld said his favourite subjects were

the explosive kind of actors: the ones who never closed a door; they slammed it. They were bigger than life – Charlie Chaplin, Ray Bolger, Carol Channing, Zero Mostel, Katharine Hepburn, Bert Lahr, the Marx Brothers. They knew what they looked like, they exaggerated themselves, and consequently they looked like their caricatures.

Al Hirschfeld maintained his energetic life style till the end, driving his car and attending the theatre. On Saturday he was working on a sketch of the Marx Brothers. On Friday, said his wife, he had been been elated at two messages – a letter announcing his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a phone call from Washington advising him that he was to be presented with the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush later this year. He was already scheduled to receive the theatre's ultimate accolade – on 21 June, when he would have been 100 years old, the Martin Beck Theater on West 46th Street will be renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theater.

Tom Vallance