Lot Essay
Inextricably tied to his native heritage, Richard Lindner's art is a distinctly German one. Referring at once to abstract art, Bavarian toys and a world of fantasy and fetishism, Lindner creates "unexpected tension, erotic expectancy and an almost oppressive respectability of the visual situations and images" (Tillim, op. cit.). As Robert Rosenblum has stated, "[He dates] from the sophisticated primitivism of the twenties. His art, in fact, is aversion of the post-Cubist developments of that decade, especially as seen in Liger, the Neuesachlichkeit or the Surrealists (R. Rosenblum, Arts, 1954, quoted in Tillim, ibid.).
In a discussion of the present painting, Sidney Tillim has commented:
One of the most distinctive features of Lindner's paintings is the doll- or mannikin-like [sic] countenance and attitudes of the figures Theirs is a particularly diabolical kind of play mingling sex, cruelty and fetishism. As we shall see, dolls and toys have played an important role in Lindner's style, less as types than as symbols of unconscious and as a source for colour whose vulgarity is consonant with the nature of the decadence in which he is involved. There is an ambiguous element here also, a nostalgia and even sentimentality (Tillim, op. cit.)
In a discussion of the present painting, Sidney Tillim has commented:
One of the most distinctive features of Lindner's paintings is the doll- or mannikin-like [sic] countenance and attitudes of the figures Theirs is a particularly diabolical kind of play mingling sex, cruelty and fetishism. As we shall see, dolls and toys have played an important role in Lindner's style, less as types than as symbols of unconscious and as a source for colour whose vulgarity is consonant with the nature of the decadence in which he is involved. There is an ambiguous element here also, a nostalgia and even sentimentality (Tillim, op. cit.)