Archives for December 11, 2018

From 2008:

Louis Armstrong was not only a great artist but one of the brightest stars in the sky of America’s popular culture. One of the signs of his admittance to that pantheon was the frequency with which Al Hirschfeld drew him. For most of his long lifetime, Hirschfeld was America’s best-known and most successful caricaturist. To be drawn by him was like being the mystery guest on What’s My Line? It meant that you’d really, truly arrived….

Read the whole thing here.

“To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical.”

Eric Hoffer, undated notebook entry (quoted in Tom Bethell, “Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook,” Harper’s, July 2005)