1903-2003 - Al Hirschfeld was born in St. Louis, Missouri. In the early 1920s he traveled in Europe, studied the European movements, and came away with a love of simple, fluid composition. After he returned to New York he decided to devote his creative life to the graphic arts and for more than fifty years successfully translated the purity of his form to the etching and lithographic processes. His caricatures of the celebrated capture perfectly the essence of the subject with added touches of humor and warmth. Deceptively simple, they are the works of an extraordinarily skilled craftsman. As a prominent observer and social chronicler of the entertainment world, in the 1930s Hirschfeld began contributing his drawings to the Sunday edition of The New York Times. His work appears in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
1903-2003 - Al Hirschfeld was born in St. Louis, Missouri. In the early 1920s he traveled in Europe, studied the European movements, and came away with a love of simple, fluid composition. After he returned to New York he decided to devote his creative life to the graphic arts and for more than fifty years successfully translated the purity of his form to the etching and lithographic processes. His caricatures of the celebrated capture perfectly the essence of the subject with added touches of humor and warmth. Deceptively simple, they are the works of an extraordinarily skilled craftsman. As a prominent observer and social chronicler of the entertainment world, in the 1930s Hirschfeld began contributing his drawings to the Sunday edition of The New York Times. His work appears in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
