Richard Lindner Biography
Richard Lindner was born in 1901. Lindner spent his youth in Nuremberg, Dürer's city, and trained as an artist at the Kunstakademie in Munich. During his formative years he was particularly struck by a visit to the collection of paintings of mental disorders amassed by the psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn at Heidelberg University.
Between 1927 and 1928 Lindner lived in Berlin, where he witnessed the development of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a movement that left an indelible mark on all his subsequent paintings. In 1929 he returned to Munich, where he married his classmate Elisabeth Schülein and began working as an artistic director for the important publishing house Knorr & Hirth. When Hitler came to power, Lindner, like many other German Jews, abandoned his native country and went to live in Paris, where he continued to work as a graphic designer until 1939. In 1941 Lindner emigrated to the United States and settled in New York, where he began contributing illustrations to Fortune, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar magazines and soon became the hottest graphic designer. Despite obtaining American citizenship in 1948, Lindner never felt completely American, although he considered himself a New Yorker. It was precisely in New York that he began to paint relatively late, in 1952. The free and cosmopolitan lifestyle of the legendary American city awakened his artistic talent and the subjects of his paintings: gangsters, prostitutes or characters from the theatre, circus or music hall - were inspired by the underworld around Times Square or taken from American mass culture. At a time when abstract expressionism was all the rage, Lindner's painting went against the grain and always kept its distance. His painterly language of vibrant colors and broad planes of color and his urban themes make him a precursor of American Pop Art. At the same time, he owes the critical tone of his paintings to the influence of European art movements such as Neue Sachlichkeit and Dada. His first exhibition did not take place until 1954, by which time he was in his fifties, and, interestingly, it was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, a venue associated with the American Expressionists. He remarried in 1969; his second wife Denise Kopelman was a young French art student. Shortly thereafter the Lindners began spending half the year in Paris. He began gaining recognition for his work in the 1970s.
