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Documented through letters, reports and exhibition reviews, this beautifully-written, illustrated account of a family dispersed by war and shattered by the Holocaust foregrounds two brothers' lives rebuilt in the aftermath of horrific events, one who became a groundbreaking painter.
The diverging paths of two surviving brothers from a German Jewish family, Richard and Arthur Lindner, are traced by Arthur’s daughter, who recounts her father's exile to an Australian internment camp and his family’s eventual settlement in England alongside the story of Richard’s life as an artist in Paris, later imprisoned in Nazi-occupied France. Securing release through art-world connections, Richard would emigrate to New York and go on to world-renown with his artwork collected by major museums around the United States and throughout Europe, including MoMA, the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim, Tate, Pompidou, and the National Gallery of American Art, and retrospectives at the Chicago Museum of Art and Hirshhorn in Washington DC.
Richard Lindner’s influence on the development of the Pop Art movement in the 1960s cemented him as an artistic and cultural icon. Shaped by Cubism and Surrealism from his time in Paris, with a strong influence of German Expressionism, his use of bold color and provocative contemporary figures created a distinct visual language that captured the American zeitgeist. Although he would come to reject the association of his work with Pop Art artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, his work, which often depicted ferocious and overtly-sexualized figures of 1930s German nightlife, was instead identified with the urban street scene of 1960s New York. For his niece, his icon status was cemented in 1967 when he was pictured on The Beatles’ infamous album cover for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Each brother’s personal striving, relationships forged and fractured, assimilation (or its absence), and even a little humor animate the book. Elsbeth Lindner’s investigation of her uncle’s career and psyche, and the impact of the older generation’s trauma leads to a clearer understanding of her own identity and affinity for her uncle.
“A dazzling memoir, beautifully written… a dance of tenderness, wryness, honesty, emotional and intellectual commitment.”
—Michèle Roberts, author of The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House, shortlisted for the Booker Prize (remarks from interview with Lindner at Jewish Book Week, London)
"In Elsbeth Lindner’s book about her Uncle Richard she paints as crisp a portrait with words as did her Uncle with paint and line. Like the writer, I lament Richard Lindner’s absence from the art-world’s center stage. Richard is among that bright band of painters that do not fit the art historians’ ‘isms’. He decried being boxed in by POP Art. He was an outlier—an outsider—like Stanley Spencer, Steinberg, Hieronymus Bosch, Frank Auerbach, Ray Johnson, Mae Wilson, Marisol ...... he was among the misfits, singularities, originals."
—Jann Haworth
"Richard Lindner was an artist of extraordinary gentleness whose work dealt almost exclusively in cruelty. His imagery fixed on the bizarre low-life of his native Germany transmuted into sinister American nightmares drenched in garish New York colors. With stiletto precision he shaped male and female figures of supreme hostility whose encounters produced a ferocious sexuality. No other 20th-century painter has depicted women with greater fanaticism or greater eroticism. A savage lust informs their monumental geography, and the promise of their embrace implies instant annihilation. And yet Lindner saw these rapacious creatures as mythic goddesses-sacred beings consumed by secret desires. Dressed in outrageous garb or seen in terrifying nakedness, they emerge as fantasy figures of unthinkable potency. Their icy grandeur creates a devouring heat, and the men seen within this ambiguous climate seem themselves enthralled by the voyeuristic dramas which Lindner invented with such cool.... The works he created will remain a disturbing and unique testament of an artist's superb craftsmanship, originality and vision."—John Gruen, ARTNews, Summer 1978
Elsbeth Lindner has had a distinguished career in British publishing, notably with Methuen, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and The Women’s Press. She was a member of the Orange Prize management committee, editor of newbooks magazine and a 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction judge. Elsbeth Lindner presented on BBC Radio 4 National Arts Show and was selected as a featured speaker at Jewish Book Week, organized by the Jewish Book Council in London. She now lives in the United States.
Judith Zilczer, Curator Emerita of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, has organized more than two dozen exhibitions and published widely on modern and contemporary art. Her essays have appeared in Art Bulletin, American Art, Art Journal, Archives of American Art Journal, artibus et historiae, and The Oxford Art Journal. She is the recipient of the Award for Best Exhibition of Time-Based Art, International Association of Art Critics (2005) and the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award of the Art Libraries Society of North America (2006). She is the author of The Noble Buyer: John Quinn Patron of the Avant-Garde (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978), Richard Lindner: Paintings and Watercolors, 1948-1977 (Prestel, 1996), Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (Thames and Hudson, 2005), and A Way of Living: The Art of Willem de Kooning (Phaidon, 2014, 2nd ed. 2017, 3rd ed. 2023). She serves on the editorial board of The Woman’s Art Journal.
1 · The Meeting
2 · Germany 1901–33
3 · France 1933–41
4 · Uprooted
5 · Elsbeth
6 · Arrival – 1940
7 · Evelyn and the Letters
8 · The 1950s
9 · The 1960s
10 · The 1970s
11 · Afterwards
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Plates