Richard Lindner was a German-born American artist. His Cubist and Surrealist paintings depicted human figures, commonly streetwalkers, circus women and men in uniform, combined with machine-like structures in a humorous erotic way. Lindner’s artworks were characterized by the use of strong lines and gradients.
Lindner was also known as an illustrator.
Background
Ethnicity:
Richard Lindner’s mother was born in New York in 1869 to a family of the German-Jewish emigrants and came back to Germany at the age of twenty. The artist’s father was German.
Richard Lindner was born on November 11, 1901, Hamburg, Germany. He was a second from three children in a middle-class family of Jüdell Lindner, a travelling salesman, and Mina Bornstein who owned a small custom-fitting corset business at home.
Four years after Lindner’s birth, the family relocated to Nuremberg where the future artist spent his childhood.
Richard had an elder sister Lissy and a younger brother Arthur.
Education
Richard Lindner attended the music school in his youth with an intention to become a concert pianist. Although later, passionate for art, the young man entered the Arts and Crafts School Nuremberg (currently Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg) in 1922.
Two years later, Lindner came to Munich where in 1925 he became a student of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts where he had been taught by Max Körner for two years. Richard was a brilliant student.
Later, at the beginning of the 1930s, the artist attended fashion school in Munich.
Richard Lindner started his career in 1927 as the illustrator at the Ullstein Verlag publishing company. In a couple of years, the artist came to Munich where he chaired publishers firm ‘Knorr & Hirth’. During his five-year stint in the city, Lindner created illustrations for various German periodicals.
In 1933 when Adolf Hitler was named a chancellor, Richard Lindner was obliged to flee the country with his wife. The couple settled down in Paris where Lindner earned his living as a commercial artist.
In 1941, the painter moved to New York City where he worked as an illustrator for such magazines as Fortune, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. While in the city, Lindner got acquainted with local artists and emigrants from Germany, among which were Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, Saul Steinberg and the novelist Hermann Kesten.
At the beginning of the new decade, the artist created his first paintings inspired by the trip to Paris. Some of these early canvases depicting criminals, prostitutes, theatrical or circus people, were demonstrated at his debut solo exhibition four years later at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City.
The same period, Lindner was involved in the teaching activity. In 1952, he joined the professor’s staff of the Pratt Institute.
By 1960, the artist became an assistant professor of art and had taught at the institution until 1966. Then, he shifted to the Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven. The artist was invited to give lectures as the visiting professor by the Hamburg University of the Fine Arts in 1965.
Three years later, his canvas ‘The Meeting’ was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art. Lindner began to take inspiration from the New York City citizens and his canvases were similar to Pop Art in style.
The artist travelled to Kassel and presented his artworks at the Documenta exhibition. This presentation was followed by the series of the shows in such German cities as Leverkusen, Hanover, Baden-Baden, Berlin as well as the retrospective at the Berkeley Art Center in New York City.
The public of his native Nuremberg had an opportunity to admire Lindner’s art only in 1974.
Quotations:
"An artist must remain a child, with an interest in unimportant things."
"I never do colour sketches. I do colour on the canvas. I have always felt that in order to be a good painter one should be colour-blind because the colour doesn't have to be seen. It only needs to be felt."
"I'm particularly interested in the secret relation between man and woman."
Membership
National Institute of Arts and Letters
,
United States
1972
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"The artistic universe of Richard Lindner is unique: he is highly genuine, he is full of urban energy, and he is driven by weird eroticism..." Claus Clement
"He was an aristocrat. and a man of rare tenderness in friendship." Saul Steinberg, cartoonist and illustrator
Connections
Richard Lindner was married twice. His first wife became his former classmate Elisabeth Schülein in 1929. They separated at the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1969, Lindner married the painter Denise Kopelman.