Milestones

By RICHARD CORLISS

He put motion and emotion in all his still lifes, glamour and elan in a weighty Sunday paper. Over his 80-year career, AL HIRSCHFELD'S witty hand made hardly an inapt stroke. At his death last week, five months short of his 100th birthday, this comic muralist left an inadvertent history of 20th century entertainment. For dozens of dailies and weeklies but mainly for the New York Times, Hirschfeld drew--and drew out the spirit of--virtually every celebrity from high art (Toscanini, Natalia Makarova) and popular art (Roberto Benigni, Natalie Wood). Through his pen, inanity became animate, and caricature met character study. The fun in a Hirschfeld sketch increased after 1945, when his daughter Nina was born. He began concealing her cognomen in and around his portraits of famous men and women--in a Gwyneth Paltrow gown, in a Groucho jacket fold--placing a numeral next to his signature to indicate how many Ninas appeared therein. It was the niftiest Sunday parlor game, a gift from the Shavian Santa who, with the delineation in a thin line, created the joy of seraphic graphic art. --By Richard Corliss 14