Some weeks I have to look around a lot, and think about what interests me, in order to find my Image of the Week; other weeks, though, the choice is obvious. This is a case of the latter, as I pay tribute to two of the finest illustrators of the twentieth century.
Caracaturist Al Hirschfeld, whose work I have admired for years, died this week. He was very prolific, and I doubt very much that there is an American who is completely unfamiliar with his work. I always loved his use of curves and intricate lines, and his willingness to employ white space, as he does here in this drawing of Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times. Of course, the most famous aspect of his work is his concealment in each drawing of his daughter's name ("Nina"), and I confess that I never encountered a Hirschfeld drawing that I did not scrutinize for the "Nina"'s. He was a wonderful artist whose work epitomizes the urbane wit that I associate with Broadway and New York.
"I guess it's okay. The replacement center says he comes from a long line of infantrymen."
Then there's Bill Mauldin, who died yesterday.
I've been meaning to read Mauldin's book, Up Front, for several years now; I'll probably bump it up into the On-Deck circle pretty soon. It's kind of sad that so often I end up exploring the work of these amazing people once their death puts them in the front of my consciousness. Mauldin's illustrative work, most famously his single-paneled cartoons depicting the wartime trials and tribulations of "dogface" GIs Willie and Joe, are masterful vignettes that capture the grittiness of life for the front-line soldiers, the concerns they have, and the particular world-view they end up taking when immediate, violent death is an omnipresent possibility. Mauldin's career didn't end with the conclusion of the war, though; in fact, he went on to doing political cartoons, eventually winning a Pulitzer in 1959. (It was his second Pulitzer; his first came for Up Front.)
Mauldin's work is not anti-war, but neither is it pro-war; instead, it's an unflinching appraisal of the human side of fighting in war.
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