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Lot Essay
Richard Lindner’s Napoleon Still Life is a striking example of the artist’s ability to transport the viewer to a surreal dimension of intriguing characters and liminal space. The composition features uncomplicated shapes in audacious colors, foregrounded by two figures, fragmented and floating in the void. In 1963, the work debuted at the exhibition Americans 1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lindner’s inclusion in this exhibition was highly praised, with an Artforum review saying that “In the face of two rooms of mediocrity, Richard Lindner’s works are the brilliant exceptions. His late paintings... are really latter-day surrealist masterpieces” (J. Monte, “Americans 1963” in Artforum, vol. 3, no. 1, p. 44). Napoleon Still Life was later included in numerous other significant exhibitions over the following decades, a testament to Lindner’s everlasting relevance and the importance of this work within his oeuvre.
Perhaps the most eye-catching elements of Napoleon Still Life are the two figures, giving the impression of being cut and pasted like paper dolls. Their pale skin and uncanny expressions are omnipresent features of Lindner’s characters, serving to blur the line between fantasy and reality. On the left is a bust of Napoleon, the infamous nineteenth-century French emperor. Lindner borrows motifs from portraits by Old Masters such as Jacques-Louis David, giving viewers just enough detail to piece together his unmistakable face and iconic hand-in-waistcoat pose. The other character in this composition is an anonymous woman transformed into a statuesque bust. Like many women Lindner depicts, she is unclothed, yet not fully revealed. “Lindner’s method is to break up the female form much as the Cubists did. The body is decomposed into its functioning parts and then assembled into an erotic puzzle” (W. Spies, “Richard Lindner” in Homage to Richard Lindner, 1980, New York, p. 8).
It is interesting to draw connections between the artist’s work and the place of his upbringing, Nuremberg. The German town simultaneously has a centuries-long history of children’s toy production and is also the birthplace of the Iron Maiden—a medieval torture device consisting of a metal casket lined with spikes. These contradictory ideas manifest in the formal elements Lindner employs: sexuality and modesty, abstraction and figuration, the organic and the mechanical. Later in life, Lindner left Europe due to Jewish persecution during the Second World War and emigrated to New York City, where he took a job as a fashion illustrator. He did not begin his career as a professional artist until he was in his fifties. Although the present work was painted the same year as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, his style made him an outlier among his Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art peers.
Napoleon Still Life is an excellent example of the transitionary period in Lindner’s oeuvre. In the early 1960s, he built upon the figurative scenes that gained him critical attention in the 1950s by integrating abstract shapes and flattening the backgrounds into two-dimensional planes. He mixed European and American motifs to invent his unique visual language—an Art Deco sensibility layered with the methods of Cubism and the energy of Surrealism. Even with his late start in life, he confidently carved out a space for himself among the greats of art history.
Perhaps the most eye-catching elements of Napoleon Still Life are the two figures, giving the impression of being cut and pasted like paper dolls. Their pale skin and uncanny expressions are omnipresent features of Lindner’s characters, serving to blur the line between fantasy and reality. On the left is a bust of Napoleon, the infamous nineteenth-century French emperor. Lindner borrows motifs from portraits by Old Masters such as Jacques-Louis David, giving viewers just enough detail to piece together his unmistakable face and iconic hand-in-waistcoat pose. The other character in this composition is an anonymous woman transformed into a statuesque bust. Like many women Lindner depicts, she is unclothed, yet not fully revealed. “Lindner’s method is to break up the female form much as the Cubists did. The body is decomposed into its functioning parts and then assembled into an erotic puzzle” (W. Spies, “Richard Lindner” in Homage to Richard Lindner, 1980, New York, p. 8).
It is interesting to draw connections between the artist’s work and the place of his upbringing, Nuremberg. The German town simultaneously has a centuries-long history of children’s toy production and is also the birthplace of the Iron Maiden—a medieval torture device consisting of a metal casket lined with spikes. These contradictory ideas manifest in the formal elements Lindner employs: sexuality and modesty, abstraction and figuration, the organic and the mechanical. Later in life, Lindner left Europe due to Jewish persecution during the Second World War and emigrated to New York City, where he took a job as a fashion illustrator. He did not begin his career as a professional artist until he was in his fifties. Although the present work was painted the same year as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, his style made him an outlier among his Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art peers.
Napoleon Still Life is an excellent example of the transitionary period in Lindner’s oeuvre. In the early 1960s, he built upon the figurative scenes that gained him critical attention in the 1950s by integrating abstract shapes and flattening the backgrounds into two-dimensional planes. He mixed European and American motifs to invent his unique visual language—an Art Deco sensibility layered with the methods of Cubism and the energy of Surrealism. Even with his late start in life, he confidently carved out a space for himself among the greats of art history.