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| Couple, 1955, oil on canvas,50
x 20 in |
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 disguises, 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.
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| Disneyland, 1955, oil on canvas,
81 x 50 in |
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 becomes
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 civilisation is also an instrument for pleasure – and
vice versa. In the end all that dressing up, armour plating and
armament does not ward off the worst threat: the threat of llust.
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
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
intensifying 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
elegant. He observes astutely and formulates precisely. We shall
understand 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, wind-up bird and 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 greater 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, 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
lollipops, 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 are
all 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 suggesting 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 US when he
emigrated in 1941 and united German and American ideas, Nürnberg
and New York.
He lived for more than two decades in Nürnberg where his parents
moved from the cool and sober Hamburg a few months after his birth.
In Nürnberg 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 Kunsigewerbeschule.
Nürnberg, city of toys and torture chambers, honey cakes and
racks, tin soldiers and pogroms, Albrecht Durer and Hans Sachsn,
humanism and schoolmasterliness, traditional ‘Gemütlichkeit’
and medieval dungeons – this Nürnberg moulded him decisively.
He always thought Nürnberg to be a terrible city. It has to
become the background for the Reichsparteitage (Nazi Party conventions)
and the Nürnberg laws (against Jewry), events which affected
Lindner’s and millions of others’ lives more horribly
than any previous discriminatory decrees, even during the Reformation.
This is the very city, within the walls of which some of the most
beautiful and most touching works of art are kept, where more phantasy
and inventiveness were put to the production of toys, than in any
other city of the world!
Maybe Lindner’s Nürnberg origin is one reason, why art
and cruelty, man and toy enter into such a strange palpable and
undisolvable synthesis in his work.
Yet one might consider the game factor in a wider sense. It determines
not only the contents of his paintings but their form as well. He
places the hoopgirl in NO, who sits so provocatively in the
letter O, and the motorbike girl in Ice instead of
facts of the hardest ‘hard edge’, playfully he mixes lettering
and illustration, super realism and well calculated abstraction.
He joins German matter-of-factness with the American sense of social
criticism and visual sophistication. He toys with different styles,
uses them, changes them, applies them whoever and however he wants
to. He even invents them anew, if necessary, if it enhances his
central theme.
Richard Lindner has a passion for playing and his favourite game
is painting. He is interested in every possible aspect of such a
game. Man and the universe fascinate him; he gambles for the highest
possible stake: himself.
Wieland Schmied
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