A DIFFERENT EYE PIERCE COLLEGE'S QUIET MILTON HIRSCHL HELPED CHANGED THE WAY WE LOOK AT ART.

Byline: Lisa M. Sodders Staff Writer

FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS, Milton Hirschl challenged his art students at Pierce College.

He had them sketch models encased in sacks of stretchy material, which transformed them into living sculptures. He dressed a model in a leotard covered with horizontal stripes to help his students learn about foreshortening. Others posed in costumes with cardboard shapes attached that made them look like figures in a Picasso painting.

What his Pierce students might not have realized is that they were being taught by an artist of the figurative-expressionist movement from the post-World War II era.

A soft-spoken, modest man, Hirschl rarely exhibited his own work, although the Smithsonian featured his one-man show in 1952. But now a retrospective of Hirschl's drawings, with their vibrant colors and strong shapes, is on exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center through Sept. 22.

``Hirschl's work represents an important nexus between American and Jewish life,'' said Tal Gozani, associate curator at Skirball, who put together the exhibit with Fine Arts curator Barbara Gilbert. ``We were impressed by his ability to use figurative expressionism to demonstrate serious aspects of his own experiences as well as by his contribution to the Los Angeles art community as an art teacher for close to 40 years.''

The retrospective includes 26 selections from Hirschl's work from 1945 to 1998, including wood-block prints, pastels on paper, ink drawings on paper and lithographs. Hirschl died in 1999, several years after retiring from Pierce.

His work was ``very mysterious,'' said Alex Carrillo, professor emeritus of art at Pierce College, who not only taught with Hirschl but also attended USC with him. ``It wasn't naturalistic, it had abstract qualities to it. Most of the figures had some kind of distortion that made them highly individualistic.

``There are some things that you see that a person draws that leave you cold,'' he said, adding that Hirschl's work had an emotional content.

Numerous disparate themes can be found through his work. He had a fascination with birds and myths associated with birds, said his wife, Sylvie Hirschl. A series featuring circus aerialists reflects Hirschl's view of them as symbols of life.

``Life is a balancing act, and it doesn't take too much to fall,'' she said.

His ``Butcher'' series, several of which are included in the exhibition, plays with the idea of butchers as being both life givers, by providing food, and life takers.

``I think he had an amazing sense of color; the palette he chose for each work is so distinct,'' Gozani said, citing the rich blues, grays, browns and blacks of his palette, some lightened with occasional bursts of fuschia or yellow.

Hirschl was born in 1917 in Youngstown, Ohio, the son of Austro- Hungarian Jewish immigrants. He received a bachelor's degree in art from Ohio State University before serving in the military during World War II. While in Europe, he visited displaced persons camps in Germany; some of his sketches from the camps are included in the exhibit.

After the war, Hirschl studied at Paris' Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Atelier de la Grande Chaumiere. It was there he also met his future wife, Sylvie, whose father perished at Auschwitz and whose uncle and aunt were executed as resistance fighters in Lyon. Sylvie spent part of the war hidden in a convent and on rural farms with her mother, who survived the Holocaust.

They met at a party: One of Sylvie's girlfriends said, `` `Here's an American guy; you speak English, you take care of him,' '' Sylvie Hirschl recalled. ``And I never stopped.''

The Hirschls moved to California, where Sylvie's father's family had relatives and Hirschl went on to get a master's in fine arts from USC in the graphic-arts department headed by Jules Heller.

His work is represented in permanent collections in New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others.

But Hirschl wasn't interested in becoming famous, his wife said.

``He was a very modest man. Some galleries had contacted him, but he didn't want people telling him, 'This will sell.' He felt he wanted the luxury of doing what he wanted to do.''

What he wanted to do was create art and teach.

``He was fiercely dedicated to teaching,'' Carrillo said.

Hirschl's book, ``Creative Figure Drawing: Art From Life, Life From Art,'' which was published in 1988, includes photos of some of his more unusual models, many influenced by his love of modern dance, along with student drawings of those models.

MILTON HIRSCHL: SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA PAINTER AND PRINTMAKER

Where: In the Ruby Gallery of the Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd.

When: Now through Sept. 22. Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

Tickets: Free. Call [phone].

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