Painter of the Crass Crowd

Pop art? Hard-edge? Many visitors to Richard Lindner's latest show at Manhattan's Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery suffer an uninformed urge to link his art to the latest fads of the newest artists. But Lindner is 62; his paintings are a liaison with the past and Europe. Groomed by Dada and formed by cubism, he shows how the art that shocks today is resolutely linked to the art that shocked yesteryear.

Lindner's paintings are violently theatrical; bathed in stagelight, they proffer biting vignettes of the modern world. Each character is an island: giant kew-pie-doll children with pasty faces, strolling tradesmen stolidly strutting with their canes, spreading ladies slickly fitted into a colorful armor of corsets. Lindner's pictorial poseurs hobnob in a funhouse atmosphere where floors that seem to slant up actually slide down and ripple-mirrors reflect limbs as if swollen with elephantiasis.

Painter Lindner grew up in the era of Brecht's social satire, of Max Beckmann's razor-sharp realism, of the street-fighting Weimar Republic, where a mark was worth less than a match.

It was easy to be an artist, because nothing else paid anything either. Lindner started off as a concert pianist, but in 1922 he cheated his way into an art academy by submitting a friend's sketches, and began his life's work. As a Jew and a Social Democrat, Lindner knew in 1933 that the rise of Hitler was a reason to flee. He arrived in the U.S. in 1941, began working as a magazine illustrator, did not get back to creative painting until 1950.

As Lindner assimilated the hubbub of urban New York, he combined his natural bent for satire with his impulse to depict city bustle: "You see women on the streets all wrapped up like candy packages," he says, and he is the artist of the concupiscent street scene, of crass crowds, of penny-ante popular life. "Macy's is the greatest museum in the world," he says. "You can study the people, the objects, the smells. Even the chandelier department is a sort of phony Versailles."

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