Richard Lindner, Offset Lithograph Poster Resistible Rise of Arturo, Bertold Brecht 1968 Pop Art, 1968

Plate signed and dated, offset lithograph.
Richard Lindner was born in Hamburg, Germany. In 1905 the family moved to Nuremberg, where Lindners mother was owner of a custom-fitting corset business and Richard Lindner grew up and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School since 1940 Academy of Fine Arts). From 1924 to 1927 he lived in Munich and studied there from 1925 at the Kunstakademie. In 1927 he moved to Berlin and stayed there until 1928, when he returned to Munich to become art director of a publishing firm. He remained there until 1933, when he was forced to flee to Paris, where he became politically engaged, sought contact with French artists and earned his living as a commercial artist. He was interned when the war broke out in 1939 and later served in the French Army. In 1941 he went to the United States and worked in New York City as an illustrator of books and magazines (Vogue, Fortune and Harper’s Bazaar). He began painting seriously in 1952, holding his first one-man exhibit in 1954. His style blends a mechanistic cubism with personal images and haunting symbolism. LIndner maintained contact with the emigre community including New York artists and German emigrants (Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, Saul Steinberg). Though he became a United States citizen in 1948, Lindner considered himself a New Yorker, but not a true American. However, over the course of time, his continental circus women became New York City streetwalkers. New York police uniforms replaced European military uniforms as symbols of authority.At a time when Abstract Expressionism was all the rage, Lindner’s painting went against the current and always kept its distance. His pictorial language of vibrant colours and broad planes of colour and his urban themes make him a forerunner of American Pop Art. At the same time, he owes the critical tone of his paintings to the influence of European art movements such as Neue Sachlichkeit and Dada. His first exhibition did not take place until 1954, by which time he was over fifty, and, interestingly, it was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, a venue associated with the American Expressionists. From 1952 he taught at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, from 1967 at Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven. In 1957 Lindner got the William and Norma Copley Foundation-Award. In 1965 he became Guest Professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste, Hamburg. His Ice (1966, Whitney Museum of American Art) established a connection between the metaphysical tradition and pop art. The painting shows harsh, flat geometric shapes framing an erotic but mechanical robot-woman.His paintings used the sexual symbolism of advertising and investigated definitions of gender roles in the media. While influencing Pop Art (Tom Wesselman and Claes Oldenburg amongst others) his highly colourful, hard-edge style seems to have brought him close to Pop Art, which he rejected. Nevertheless, he is immortalised on the cover of the Beatles record “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1967) as a patron of the pop culture.