Page 41 - Studio International - December 1968

dreamworld, Disneyland and Greenwich Village, Madison Avenue
and Sunset Boulevard, 42nd Street and Fishermen's Wharf), into the
pure enjoyment of art. And more: he wants to translate the conflict
of carnal pleasures into the rich tension and lasting pleasure of art.
Yet he cannot depict pleasure without at once annoying and intensi-
fying it through all the disturbance, irritation and aggression of
colours, forms and objects.
Richard Lindner leads a retired life with his work in his penthouse
on 69th Street. He is intelligent and witty, delicately built and ele-
gant. He observes astutely and formulates precisely. We shall under-
stand the nature of this man better knowing that he owns a big
collection of everyday as well as unusual toys, gathered from all the
corners of the world and assembled carefully on shelves in his
bachelor's apartment. There are dolls and masks, clocks and bells,
photographs and fetishes, artists and motorcyclists, a clown on a
unicycle and a rider on horseback, men at the billiard table and a
gymnast on a ladder, a wind-up bird and a tiger with wide-open
jaws showing his teeth.
The people in his paintings are like toys, and as such they convey
Lindner's special concept of man: man is an object, an instrument.
He functions, he lets himself be manipulated, one can wind him up
to make him run. He will perform somersaults over a pole or climb
up and down ladders. Lindner sees man with the features of masked
anonymity—stereotyped, pre-imprinted, doll-like and artificial. This
is faceless, anonymous and isolated mankind in search of pleasures
and yet living with great intensity and vulnerability.
The people in his paintings are always passing each other without
seeing one another as in The moon over Alabama; they stare past
each other as in The meeting or The street; they turn their backs
on each other as in One way or in Telephone (where even the
telephone is only a pretence at communication) ! They wear many
different masks in order to hide their featureless faces. They wear
dark glasses, crash helmets, hoods, hats deep into their faces, even
their hair serves only as a disguise.
Woman triumphs. All activity emanates from her. With her sex
she attacks the male and she introduces brutality and intensity into
the game. Lindner's creatures are precocious girls with knowing
bodies and innocent faces like dolls, Lolitas in miniskirts with lolli-
pops, teenagers with tiny hats under small berets wearing low-cut
blouses brash with the ornament of pointed breasts, tweens in leather
suits or space outfits or older women looking younger. They all are
alike in this : their strength is centred in their prominent thighs. They
don't want to grow old. They don't even want to grow up. They
want to remain forever in a play-world where fate cannot enter. This
is the tragedy of Marilyn Monroe shown in the picture Marilyn
Monroe was here. A black shadow falls on half of the figure sug-
gesting that half of her life is extinguished. The tragedy lies in the
opinion that to have a destiny means to be given to death, prone to
dying, sure to die.
Is this the world of America, is this New York?
Certainly to a high degree, but not all together.
Lindner imported his concept of a toy world into the U.S. when he
emigrated in 1941 and united German and American ideas, Nurn-
berg and New York.
He lived for more than two decades in Nurnberg where his parents
moved from the cool and sober Hamburg a few months after his
birth. In Nurnberg he spent his childhood and played his first games;
here he saw in the Germanische Museum the witches of Hans
Baldung Grien, here he began to study fine arts at the Kunstge-
werbeschule. Nurnberg, city of toys and torture chambers, honey
cakes and racks, tin soldiers and pogroms, Albrecht Dürer and Hans
Sachs, humanism and schoolmasterliness, traditional top
'Gemütlich-keit' and medieval dungeons—this Nurnberg moulded him decisively. Disneyland, 1965, oil on canvas, 81+ x 50 in.
He always thought Nurnberg to be a terrible city. It has to become
above
the background for the Reichsparteitage (Nazi Party conventions) Couple, 1955, oil on canvas. 50 x 20 in.