Hirschfeld On Line - caricatures, photographs

Hirschfeld On Line is just that - it's Al Hirschfeld "on" Hirschfeld, as the master turns his quick quill pen to prose in order to comment, critique, explicate, and occasionally even lampoon his own artwork, from the very first theatre drawings he did in the mid-twenties.

Here is Hirschfeld on the dramatic and droll stories behind his scenes, as well as those of the Broadway stages he's covered graphically since the American theatre came of age with O'Neill and Show Boat. Here are his most famous and enduring images - life that one of Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, or that long-striding one of Robert Preston in The Music Man, or that one of well, the list - the distinguished line - goes on and on. He tells us at long last not only why he draws but what and how he has drawn it. He even reveals which drawings incorporate section of old wallpaper from early dwelling places.

Over the years he's gotten to meet as well as caricature the likes of the century's great figures. He worshipped F.D.R., yet, .upon finally meeting him, found him vain. On one page Hirschfeld calmly recounts a story about how he would have Marlene Dietrich over to the house for breakfast, and the next has him showing up in some remote barn to execute a drawing of the rock-group Aerosmith in rehearsal. In between is the tale of how he helped out Rodgers and Hammerstein with the art direction and costuming of a musical they were writing called The King and I.

As Mel Gussow, the renowned cultural writer and critic, explains it in his comprehensive introductory issay, people actually change after they've been "Hirschfelded." Carol Channing claims that Hirschfeld practically invented her stage "character" in his early renderings of her (Hirschfeld humbly refutes this). Ray Bolger, the Straw Man of The Wizard of Oz complained that he had to act and leap about ever more astoundingly on stage simply to "keep us" with the image of himself projected by Hirschfeld in the Sunday Times.

Al Hirschfeld is arguably the finest American artist who ever drew breath. As he continues into the next century to draw the world as he sees it, we're fortunate to have this 344 page 1999 hardcover book chronicling his first century of masterpieces to take our breath away.

Also included are 32 pages of the master's less-well-known but equally entertaining color illustrations and paintings, among them his first color drawing for The New York Times.

Topics covered include:

• On Hirschfeld
  • The Broadway artist by Mel Gussow
  • Looking over his shoulder by Louise Kerz Hirschfeld
  • My Al Hirschfeld by Whoopi Goldberg
  • Al Hirschfeld, the maker of icons by Kurt Vonnegut
  • High style and Hirschfeld by Grace Mirabella
  • Al Hirschfeld's secret by Arthur Miller
  • Growing up in (My Father's) pictures by Nina

• Youth and young manhood
• Photographs by Hirschfeld
• The middle years
• Hirschfeld in color
• The later years

Publisher's list price for this book is $59.95.

Condition: As new. Still in the original shrink wrap.

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