Richard Lindner

(American/German, 1901–1978)

Richard Lindner was an American-German artist known for his bizarrely erotic portraits which meld human figures with machine-like elements. With their bold outlines and stretches of gradient color, Lindner’s figures are reminiscent of those by Fernand Léger. The artist’s 1954 painting Boy with Machine was famously used by the French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s as the cover of their book Anti-Oedipus (1972). “An artist must remain a child, with an interest in unimportant things,” he once said. Born on November 11, 1901 in Hamburg, Germany, his family moved to the city of Nuremberg in 1905, where his mother ran a boutique corset shop. A talented musician as a youth, Lindner’s interest in visual art led him to attend the Kunstakademie in Munich, where he studied from 1925 until 1927. In 1929, he became the art director at Knorr & Hirth, a large publishing house, where he worked until 1933. Being of Jewish descent, Lindner fled to Paris to avoid arrest by the Nazi regime during the mid-1930s. In 1941, he moved to New York and worked as an illustrator for numerous publications, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Fortune. By 1952, Lindner had stopped his commercial assignments in order to devote his time completely to painting. The artist died on April 16, 1978 in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, among others.