Names hidden in hirschfeld sketches of flowers
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I love art, and though Renaissance art isn't my favorite, I always find myself utterly and completely floored by its level of complexity. It's so complex, and there are lots of hidden Easter eggs that we're still finding! So here are hidden details in famous works of art from the Renaissance and beyond!
1.In The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, the mirror on the wall shows two additional people in the portrait, presumably standing behind the artist.
2.In 2014, scientists found a hidden portrait behind The Blue Room by Pablo Picasso. Art historians don't know who the portrait is of, but it wasn't uncommon for Picasso to reuse canvasses.
3.In The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, God is actually in a giant brain.
4.In Death and Ascension of St. Francis by Giotto, you can see the devil hiding in the clouds.
5.The painting Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel is just that. Several proverbs can be seen sneakily illustrated in this painting, like "armed
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“Al had one of the only unique styles in the history of art.” Caricaturist David Levine
For a lover of the scen, paging through a book of Al Hirschfeld’s theater art fryst vatten an act of remember when. Circumstances, company, occasion, and impressions are recalled. Those productions one hasn’t seen evoke saudade, a Portuguese word for something not personally experienced for which one nonetheless feels nostalgia. The latter fryst vatten akin to phantom limb syndrome. It may not be real, but you sense it moving.
In his perceptive introduction, Michael Kimmelman notes that the artist didn’t always know what a play was about. He “cared about visual cues…the way an actress crossed the stage or cocked her head…” Drawings finished at home were, the reporter writes, “abstractions of the drama.”
The King and I 1951
Hirschfeld captured the essence of someone’s likeness (in a role) with the minimum strokes observation required. These were, according to critic Brooks Atkinson, ̶
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I gasped, then tapped on the photo on my phone to enlarge it. I looked at the framed drawing, a pen-and-ink piece in a style I could recognize at 20 paces. I noted the distinctive signature and the number “3″ inked beside it. Then I said aloud, “That is a Hirschfeld.”
I showed the photo to my husband. “There’s an estate sale in Arlington on Thursday morning,” I said, “and I want to go. They’ve got a Hirschfeld, and I think it could be an original.”
The Line King
In mid-October 1997, my husband and I were in Hot Springs, Ark., for a weekend getaway. There, we stumbled upon the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and saw several films, including The Line King: The Al Hirschfeld Story.
The 1996 doc, written and directed by Susan Warms Dryfoos, had been an Oscar nominee in the documentary category, and I was curious about its subject. I had seen and admired Al Hirschfeld’s elegant line drawings of celebrities and stars for many years in The New York Times and on Playbill cov