“As an artist, Hirschfeld, who died at 99 on Monday, cared about visual cues: gestures, mannerisms, the way an actress dashed across the stage or cocked her head while he sat in the dark of the theater jotting shorthand impressions to take home and translate into drawings. Call them abstractions of the drama, which became loopy lines, dashes, dots, curlicues and crosshatches. He was a genius at capturing likenesses in a few serendipitous strokes — as good as they got, week after week, since the 1920’s, turning the viewing of his work on this page into an American ritual. But what really separates him from other caricaturists is the vitality and suppleness of his line, an abstract matter.”