Marginalia
by: Schvach Yid

Luciano Pavarotti, the great operatic tenor, died last week. He wasn’t Jewish, and this is a Jewish blog site, so what gives? Well, lots of Jews like/liked his work (thank Gd for audio and video recordings). My maternal Oma (grandmother) was among them.

The great caricature artist Al Hirschfeld, who was Jewish, died in 2003 (age 99 years). He was renowned for his rapidograph-like portraitures of the rich and famous which, I suppose, are known to just about everyone. A biographical piece about this artist was written by Andrea Sachs for Time Magazine in 2002 and can be accessed online at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020121-193543,00.html.

Al Hirschfeld honored Luciano Pavarotti with his schematic renderings on more than one occasion, and so, in tribute to them both, here is one of those depictions by Mr. Hirschfeld, a tribute by a great fine artist to a great performing artist.

(My apologies to the readers of this blog for the error I made in the now-deleted predecessor to this blog titled The Jew As Artist.)

Pavarotti with friends:

Al Hirschfeld: