Richard Lindner

American, 1901 - 1978

BiographyBorn in 1901 at Hamburg, Germany, Richard Lindner became a fine-art painter of hard-edge abstract figures, a fashion illustrator and art educator. His signature figural works reflect his perception of the un-fulfillment of pop culture and are shown in surreal settings with garish bright colors, flat forms and faces with severe expressions. Among them are streetwalkers, military personnel, mannequins and circus performers---all looking mechanical and unhappy.

Richard Lindner spent his childhood in Nuremberg and studied there at the Kunstgewerbeschule. From 1924 to 1927 he lived in Munich where he studied from 1925 at the Kunstakademie. He moved to Berlin and stayed there until 1928 and then returned to Munich to become art director of a publishing firm. He remained there until 1933 when he was forced to flee to Paris, where he became politically engaged, sought contact with French artists and earned his living as a commercial artist.

Richard Lindner was interred when the war broke out in 1939 and later served in the French army. In 1941 he went to America where he worked in New York as an illustrator of books and magazines and made contact with New York artists and German emigrants. In 1948 he became an American citizen.

From 1952 to 1967, Lindner taught at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and from 1967 at Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven. In 1965 he became Guest Professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste, Hamburg.

His paintings at this time used the sexual symbolism of advertising and investigated definitions of gender roles in the media.

Richard Lindner died in 1978.
Richard Lindner was born in Hamburg, West Germany in 1901 and grew up in Nuremberg, Germany. As a boy of eleven he was abducted by a beautiful twenty-year old actress. He studied at the Hamburg School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1922 and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1924.

He narrowly escaped execution as a Jewish exile in France during World War II, emigrating to the United States in 1941. He worked for more than ten years as a commercial illustrator for Vogue Magazine from 1941 to 1950. He had his first one-man show at the age of fifty-three. He taught at Pratt Institute in New York City from 1951 to 1965.

Lindner's work started out being sophisticated, unique and terribly disturbing, concerned with European alienation. His later work digs deep into the American heart; it evokes the uneasy coexistence between technology and sexuality. The canvases are beautifully engineered. Their symmetry meshes perfectly, colors are metallic and people are often part machine.

Lindner died in 1978.

Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.

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