untitled, Richard Lindner

Over the years I have accumulated a number of exhibition posters. Among them is an especially striking design by Richard Lindner for his 1969 exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where I was on the museum’s education staff. The show, with its emphasis on imagery inspired by the tough streets of New York City, Lindner’s adopted home, made a huge impression on viewers, including myself. The poster, though damaged in the course of a half century’s travels, still provides a happy reminder of that powerful and revelatory exhibition.
The Spencer’s untitled work, painted in 1956 and reproduced in Esquire magazine two years later, represents a transitional period for Lindner as he moved from a successful career as a skilled illustrator to easel paintings. In his work from 1956 to 1958 he approached abstraction more closely than at any other time. This work’s collage-like planes of color, seemingly derived from Lindner’s early interest in Cubist compositions, anticipate the flattened forms that populate his later and larger canvases. The distorted anatomy suggests directions of his subsequent figures—some conjoined with other figures or machines, others distorted or fragmentary.
Lindner’s late works extend and enrich the expressionist tradition of his native Germany. For the artist, however, it was America that became home for the wartime refugee, something he realized only after several decades in this country. More specifically, he admitted that he was, “not really an American—I am a New Yorker, a product of New York . . . [where] everybody is a performer; the city is an enormous stage twenty-four hours a day.” It was from that Manhattan-sized stage that Lindner drew inspiration for the distinctive and disturbing types that populate his late paintings—sexualized women, demonic children, gangsters, and the secretive Stranger—figures which are anticipated in this untitled painting. CCE