Page 40 - Studio International - December 1968

Richard Lindner and the human being as a toy

A Lindner retrospective exhibition, shown at the Städtisches Museum Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen
in November, is to be shown at the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, from January 1 until March 9, 1969.
From there it will go to the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, the Haus am Waldsee, Berlin and Berkeley
University Museum, California.

Wieland Schmied

In the work of no living painter does man appear a toy to such a
degree as in that of Richard Lindner. His people, heroes and whores
of our times, slaves to the joys of conspicuous consumption, victims
to the adventures of the big city, experienced in many kinds of games,
prefer to occupy themselves with toys. They spin tops, lick ices,
handle machines, dress like dolls, surround themselves with hoops—
and right away we know: for these people, other people are only
toys, they are prepared to use them.
Richard Lindner's people seem to be living in amusement parks
or coming out of gambling dens. They are shaped by the machines
they play with: music boxes and slot machines, electrical pin-ball
machines and rifle-ranges. Their clothing gleams like coloured
lamps; the breasts of the women glare like targetplates. Man himself
has become a toy. In Lindner's pictures of the late fifties the human
figure looks like a cut-out, pasting-game or puzzle, either as targets
or hidden within the chinese puzzle of abstract forms. In the more
recent pictures man walks the neonlit night streets in many dis-
guises, aggressive and madly alone.
Lindner's people are ironclad like motorcyclists, they are wrapped
in corsets like knightly armour, they hide under helmets and behind
spectacles, they are tied with belts, garters and buckles, they wear
visor-like masks and uniforms of leopardskin. They are armed with
sticks and whips and armoured with boots and kilts. They shine like
polished metal and glossy leather. Their clothing is aggressive down
to the colour composition : poisonous green next to piercing violet,
shocking pink against dangerous blue. Even the smallest formal
details show this—the points of high heels, the curve of hips and hair,
the edges of epaulettes, the dagger-like points of sunglasses, puffy
lips and brutal thighs. The telephone receiver becomes a grenade,
the rim of a lady's hat cuts like the tail-fins of her car.
Games turn into war and war into a game. For Lindner life seems
a big game, and a dangerous one. It is a game of colours: traffic
signals, illuminated advertisements and shop-windows. But life is
also an arena for continuous fighting, unrelenting attacks and alert
defence; a war of the streets, technology, the sexes. The whip be-
comes an attribute of woman, the gun of the boy, and against both
neither waistcoat nor cloak, sunglasses nor hood can protect. The
erotic game is demasked as a battle for power. Each instrument of
torture within civilization is also an instrument for pleasure—and
vice versa. In the end all that dressing up, armour plating and arma-
ment does not ward off the worst threat: the threat of lust.
The world of the painter Lindner is a world of dressing up and
packaging, a world of sensual temptations and suggestive desires, a
world of cruel children and wicked toys, a world without a past that
wants to live unseeingly into the future, that wishes never to grow
up, a world of the moment—this is the world of the United States,
this is the world of New York.
Lindner wants to transfer the trite amusements and entertainment
centres of our modern world (New York's night life, Hollywood's