(The first of these, “Socially Distant Theater,” which went online in May of last year, consisted, in a nod to the times, of Hirschfeld drawings of solo stage performers.) Since Hirschfeld’s death, in 2003, the foundation has organized or assisted in organizing exhibitions of his work in various venues across North America and Europe, but, with the onset of the coronavirus, the shows have gone digital. The foundation maintains a large collection of works by its namesake, the famed American caricaturist, who, in the course of his nearly nine-decade career, captured the likenesses of a wide-ranging array of performers in the world of theatre, music, television, and film: from Leonard Bernstein to Liza Minnelli, Dizzy Gillespie to the “Sex and the City” foursome, the Beatles to the “Sesame Street” puppets, Katharine Hepburn to Cher.
So it is with the Al Hirschfeld show “ A National Insanity: 75 Years of Looking for NINA,” which recently “closed” but, thankfully, is still available for viewing indefinitely, on the Web site for Hirschfeld’s foundation. (On entering the Met, the other week, I felt almost literally uplifted.) And yet, sometimes, a virtual art exhibit can hit just the spot, too. The reopening of galleries and museums in New York, after those locked-down early-pandemic months, in which art shows could only be viewed online, has made me newly appreciative of the ability to move my body through an actual exhibition space.