The reopening of galleries and museums in New York, after those locked-down early-pandemic months, in which art shows could only be viewed online, has made me newly appreciative of the ability to move my body through an actual exhibition space. (On entering the Met, the other week, I felt almost literally uplifted.) And yet, sometimes, a virtual art exhibit can hit just the spot, too. So it is with the Al Hirschfeld show “A National Insanity: 75 Years of Looking for NINA,” which recently “closed” but, thankfully, is still available for viewing indefinitely, on the Web site for Hirschfeld’s foundation.
The foundation maintains a large collection of works by its namesake, the famed American caricaturist, who, in the course of his nearly nine-decade career, captured the likenesses of a wide-ranging array of performers in the world of theatre, music, television, and film: from Leonard Bernstein to Liza Minnelli, Dizzy Gillespie to the “Sex and the City” foursome, the Beatles to the “Sesame Street” puppets, Katharine Hepburn to Cher. Since Hirschfeld’s death, in 2003, the foundation has organized or assisted in organizing exhibitions of his work in various venues across North America and Europe, but, with the onset of the coronavirus, the shows have gone digital. (The first of these, “Socially Distant Theater,” which went online in May of last year, consisted, in a nod to the times, of Hirschfeld drawings of solo stage performers.)
Hirschfeld called himself a “characterist,” and he was able to capture a figure’s very essence with the lightest licks of the pen—notations as elegant and economical as a dance. His elongated calligraphic line is immediately distinguishable by the special attention he gives to hair and clothing, with characters often rendered most precisely through a fine tangle of locks or a draping of a jacket. Around two decades into his career, Hirschfeld developed another signature, which he continued to employ in his work until his death, and which is the focus of “A National Insanity.” When his daughter was born, in 1945, the artist began to conceal her name—Nina—in his illustrations, hidden, in the artist’s words, “in folds of sleeves, tousled hairdos, eyebrows, wrinkles, backgrounds, shoelaces—anywhere to make it difficult, but not too difficult, to find.” This turned the observation of his drawings—which were carried in many American newspapers and magazines, and most prominently, for three-quarters of a century, in the Times—into a kind of game, a “Where’s Waldo?” for sharp-eyed culture mavens. (In 1960, fifteen years into his Nina experiment, Hirschfeld began to add a number next to his signature, to indicate how many iterations of the name were included in an illustration.)
“A National Insanity” is uniquely suited to its online form, thanks to the ability to zoom in, which makes it easier to find the “Ninas,” and leads you, besides, to pay closer attention to the illustrations themselves. Clicking through the exhibition, I was reminded of my childhood pastime, introduced to me by my father, of searching for “Ninas” in Hirschfeld drawings. I grew up, for the most part, in Israel, and poring over Hirschfeld’s work, as a child, familiarized me with luminaries of a certain coastal North American cultural milieu that I might not have known otherwise. (In this it stands shoulder to shoulder with other artifacts I viewed and read in my young adulthood, like Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” and Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn.”) A couple of years ago, a thoughtful friend bought a second-hand collection of Hirschfeld illustrations to give to my daughter, who happens to be named Nina. As I sat with her, side by side, leafing through the book, it seemed to me as if we were participating in a sacred rite. Scrolling through “A National Insanity” reminded me of this feeling; zooming in to find the “Ninas” in Aaron Copland’s tie or the von Trapp children’s sleeves in “The Sound of Music” was the kind of family tradition I’d be very happy to pass on. I couldn’t wait to show Nina.
