LINDNER, Richard (Hamburg, 1901 – New York, 1978)
The life of the painter Richard Lindner, German by birth but who later became American citizen, acquires a special meaning with regard to his whole oeuvre. His father was a German Jew and his mother American. Lindner spent his youth in Nuremberg, Durer’s city, and was trained as an artist at the Munich Kunstakademie. During his studies, he was especially affected by his visit to a collection of paintings made by people with mental disorders gathered at the University of Heilderberg by the psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn. During the years 1927 and 1928 he lived in Berlin, where he witnessed the development of the Neue Sachlichkeit, a movement which left an indelible mark on all his later works. In 1929 he returned to Munich, where he married his friend from his student years Elisabeth Schülein and began working as the artistic director of the important publishers Knorr & Hirth. With Hitler’s coming to power, Lindner, like many German Jews, left his homeland and moved to Paris, where he continued to work as a graphic designer until 1939.
In 1941 he emigrated to the United States, settled in New York where he began to work as illustrator in magazines such as Fortune, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar; soon he became the most fashionable graphics designer. Although he obtained American citizenship in 1948, Lindner never felt entirely American, although he considered himself a true New Yorker. It was precisely in New York where, in 1952, he began, rather late, his career as a painter. The emancipated and cosmopolitan life of that mythical American city kindled his artistic talent; as for the protagonists of his paintings—gangsters, prostitutes, or characters from the world of theatre, the circus or vaudevilles—he drew inspiration from the underworld around Times Square, or from American mass culture. At a time when Abstract Expressionism was gaining success, Lindner’s painting developed against the current and always kept its distance from it. His artistic language, with vibrant colours and wide planes of colour, and his urban themes, turned him into a precursor of American Pop art. At the same time, the critical tone of his paintings shows he was indebted to European artistic movements such as New Objectiveness and Dada. His first exhibition was not held until 1954, when he was over 50 years of age, curiously at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, a gallery linked to the American expressionists. In 1969 he married the young French art student Denise Kopelman and, shortly after, the Lindners began spending half the year in Paris. The decade of the 1970s also saw the acknowledgement of his oeuvre, which had remained forgotten until then. He died in 1978.
P A
<< back