Lindner's Ladies
March, 1973
The Art of Richard Lindner is an art of the fantastic. Out of a wide experience of life—particularly urban life. With its mad, headlong, unappeased appetite for the extremes of existence—and an uncanny, painstaking power of observation, Lindner has created an art of bizarre and outrageous images. He confronts the workaday distortions and exaggerations of modern life with the graver and more hilarious hyperbole of his own imagination. He is a realist of sorts, but his art is untouched by the traditional realist obligation to report on the commonplace surfaces of life. He is, rather, a realist of the "secret life"—of all those unacknowledged fantasies and involuntary daydreams provoked by the social and erotic exacerbations of life in the maelstrom of the modern city. As a result, Lindner's art compels the spectator to be a voyeur of his own forbidden, libidinous dreams.
Lindner depicts these fantasies in a pictorial style that is at once extremely detached and extremely provocative. He is a master draftsman, a virtuoso technician of the brush, a flawless performer in bringing every detail of his complex visiou to meticulous realization. He is always in total control of his medium. Yet the very coolness of his methods, the professional polish and even slickness of his technique are a foil for the heated erotic atmosphere that pervades his work. The detachment of the worldly artist-observer only serves to make the subject matter itself, dominated by images of oversized Mod goddesses and temptresses swollen with an appetite for experience, all the more compelling. The very rigor of the form, almost geometric in conception and highly impersonal in its execution, intensifies our response to an imagination that is aflame with elaborate scenarios of the buried inner life.
Lindner's is an art lavish in visual incident, and this, too, makes it exceptional. One has to adjust one's response to almost a different medium. His mind is, in some respects, closer to that of a novelist or a film director than to that of a painter, at least a modern painter for whom the subject, if it exists at all, is often only a pretext for the perfection of a form that effectively eliminates the need for a subject. Lindner's paintings have a cast of characters, a plot of sorts, an action—usually an arrested or threatened action—that can be discerned. In the presence of a Lindner episode, the spectator often feels a certain apprehension and alarm as well as an odd exhilaration and release. At the same time, Lindner's world is a comic one, though the comedy is not particularly happy. It is a world of sexual power and social pretension and the gestures and costumes the characters assume for the games they act out on the vast stage of the mind.
In Lindner's comic universe, there are plenty of male figures but no heroes. There are only robust heroines who are anything but benign or accommodating. Women are the figures of authority, agents of aggression ready to tyrannize over male susceptibilities. In this world, all power emanates from female prowess, but this prowess is itself a comic illusion spawned in the fantasy of male vulnerability. For the males in Lindner's imaginary universe are mainly boys—passive and expectant, poised between innocence and experience, waiting for the great secret that can be disclosed to them only by the female predator or the female redeemer—or else they are men sporting the costumes of virility that boys can only imagine.
The female figure of power assumes many guises in Lindner's work—whore, nursemaid, Earth Mother, nymphet, ingenue, femme fatale. But whatever mask she wears—and her face is always a mask, seductive but unknowable—she is always charged with a voracious erotic energy. She is always in command, ready to give orders, and there is, indeed, something military in her bearing. Her every costume exudes power, especially the famous mechanistic underclothes—the elaborate corsets and cruel garter belts—which have the look of some fantastic military instrument for securing unconditional erotic surrender. There is, in Lindner's women, an almost horrific, devouring vitality. Their bodies assume grotesque proportions, which their ingenious garments can hardly contain, but they are the unmistakable proportions of health and well-being, the outsize proportions of a vital force. If there is an element of menace in this fantasy of female vitality and power, it is the menace of life itself, the fearful biological crux as it makes itself felt in the boy's passive but alert imagination and then lodges itself in the deeper recesses of the adult male consciousness.
An art of fantasy, then. An art of erotic projection, expectation, fear, comedy and—however bizarre—gratification. But Lindner's art is also an art of social comedy. It holds a mirror (albeit distorted) up to the crazy, far-out surfaces of the urban spectacle. The visual language of the streets and the boutiques, of demotic polyglot cultures confronting the homoenized dreams of advertising and the TV screen, of machines, buildings and objects competing with the crowds for space in which to survive and flourish—somehow all of this makes itself felt in Lindner's pictorial style, with its garish color and fluorescent light its (concluded on page 189)Lindner's Ladies(continued from page 100) deliberately vulgar taste, its hard-edged angular forms. In Lindner's art, the tensions and passions of city life—above all, the life of New York—are the center of the universe. The sheer harsh vividness of the urban scene, so much more an assault on the senses than a caress, sets the tone and rhythm of his art, and his triumph consists of the way he has been able to capture that vividness and make of it something so unmistakably personal, so completely a part of his innermost imagination.
It is the triumph of an outsider for whom New York—and perhaps life itself—remains an exotic adventure, a mystery without a solution. Lindner is the archetypal exile, shrewd in his perception of an alien terrain but at home only in the geography of his own imagination. The glossy American surface of his art is actually the inspired invention of a foreign observer finally coming to terms with the cultural shock of American life. Lindner came to America in 1941, when he was already 40 years old. He was twice a refugee, fleeing his native Germany for Paris when Hitler came to power in 1933, and then fleeing France when the war made it impossible for a German alien—and a Jew besides—to remain on French soil. He was an artist, an intellectual and a Jew, at home in the cafès and the old culture of the emancipated European bourgeoisie, who found himself, through the cruel workings of history, in the new world of rootless exile and threatened oblivion. Both these worlds left their mark on him and on his art.
There is a powerful historical dimension to the air of anxiety and menace that pervades Lindner's art. He is not, in any explicit sense, a political artist, but there is nonetheless a hidden political substratum in his painting. The contest of power has been transferred to the realm of erotic reverie, yet the sense of harsh conflict and the will to dominate—the awful sense of vulnerability on the part of the victim, the general aura of a merciless universe—cannot entirely be accounted for in sexual terms. The action one discerns in Lindner's art is somehow larger and more malevolent than the protagonist's erotic psychodra-ma. The refugee forced into alien and unfriendly circumstance by the vicissitudes of history is subsumed in the persona of the passive boy-child awakened to the threat of his biological fate. There is an almost Darwinian identification of political power and sexual dominance in Lindner's complex vision of life. The innocent are condemned to be victims, the victims collaborators in their own undoing.
Lindner's art thus marks the collision of two cultures and two periods of history. Out of his childhood in Nuremberg and his student days in Munich he has distilled a rich fund of imagery—of toys and puppets and the circus, of cabaret life and fairy tales and erotica—transmuted into symbols he cannot himself wholly explain. Out of the earlier history of modern art in Europe, particularly the painting of Lèger, with its powerful and precise depiction of objects and figures—figures as hard and objective as objects—he has fashioned the formal components of his own pictorial style. Yet it required the shock and release of the American experience for Lindner to make his extraordinary leap into a fully matured, integrated style. His work as an artist dates from his experience of New York. His first one-man show came in 1954, when he was 53 years old, and to many he has since seemed one of the "youngest" painters on the New York scene. For this particular outsider, harboring the memories of his distant boyhood in an unfamiliar culture, observing a new order of civilization with the bruised emotions of another time and place, fantasy and reality have fused into a single consciousness. The scenarios of the past have proved to be a perfect index to the emotions of the present.
'Ice," 1966, Oil on Canvas, 70x60, Collection Whiteney Museum of American Art. Gift of the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
"Hello," 1968, Collection Harry N. Abrams Family, New York, New York.
Untitled #2, 1962, Private Collection, Chicago, Illinois.
"Angel in Me," 1966, Collection Mr, and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer, Winnetke, Illinois.
Untitled #1, 1962, Collection Mr. and Mrs. Morton G. Neumann, Chicago, Illinois.
"Marilyn Was Here," 1967, Collection Dr, Max Palevsky, Los Angeles, California.
"Laopard Lily," 1966, Ludwig Collection, Calogne, West Germany.
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