Tag: fernand léger

Richard Lindner

Richard Lindner, “The Meeting”, 1953, Oil on Canvas, 152.4 x 182.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Born at Hamburg in November of 1901, Richard Lindner was a German-American painter and illustrator. Unique as an artist, he created his own oeuvre: hard-edged paintings with stretches of color that melded human figures with machine-like elements. Lindner’s paintings in the 1960s used the sexual symbolism of advertising and investigated definitions of gender roles in the media.

Lindner’s career as an artist began at the age of forty after his arrival in New York City. Acknowledged as a significant and unique European-American painter, he was represented by prestigious galleries, including New York’s Cordier & Ekstrom and Betty Parson Gallery, and the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris. Lindner had solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Berkeley’s University Art Museum, the Walker Center in Minneapolis, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. 

Richard Lindner did not fit into any modernist or post-modernist category. He was erroneously categorized  as a precursor of Pop Art. Lindner, however, regarded himself as a hard-edge painter with roots in European culture, particularly that of Germany in the Weimar years from 1919 to 1933. His work emerged from the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) in the 1920s, a reaction against German Expressionism that created a new realism with a grim but precise, satirical edge. Another source, perhaps more important, was the work of French painter Fernand Léger whose figurative work consisted of formalized, mechanical bodies with bold outlines; after 1927, this work became more organic and irregular.

Thoroughly knowledgable about European art, Lindner thought of himself as a European artist in exile, having escaped safely from the clutches of the German government in the 1930s. He adored New York’s cosmopolitan nature as well as its glamorous and seedier sides, aspects of which were used as themes in his work. Lindner’s paintings were created from the icons of American fantasy: Times Square, Coney Island, Hollywood, Las Vegas and Disneyland. His works displayed an iconographic human circus removed from reality, fantastic and dangerous at the same time. 

“The Meeting” is considered Lindner’s first masterpiece; it is, surely, one of the odder paintings of the latter half of this century. Inside an impossibly claustrophobic room, Lindner has assembled tokens of obsession as well as friends and family: a buffoonish King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Lindner’s sister Lissy, the artist as a child with his aunt, and friends Hedda Sterne, Evelyn Hofer, and Saul Steinberg. The compositional anchors of the “The Meeting”, however, are a corseted woman whose back is toward us and a large cat who stares at the viewer in an accusatory manner. The bits-and-pieces quality of the painting is typical of Lindner’s compositions, although the space seen here is more “realistic” than the abstracted environments that were to follow. The isolation of each figure stems from Lindner’s collage-like sensibility. The portraits of Sterne and Steinberg, for instance, are based on photographs and their incongruity is due, in part, to the artist’s working methods. But Lindner’s best paintings don’t surrender to fragmentation, they flirt with it, and symbolic and pictorial density of “The Meeting” goes beyond cleverness.”

—Mario Naves, Richard Lindner: A New Yorker in Washington, The New Criterion, Art January 1997

Notes: In 1967, the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album appeared to wide acclaim at the height of Beatlemania. It was one of the most successful albums with more than eleven million copies sold in the United States alone. British painter Peter Blake designed the album cover which featured over seventy faces of recognizable people from Marilyn Monroe and Mae West to Marlon Brando and Edgar Allan Poe. Of all these famous faces, there was only one face that depicted a painter: Richard Lindner.

Second Insert Image: Richard Lindner, Untitled, Colored Lithograph, 44/125 Edition, 1975, “Eugène Ionesco” Series, 38.5 x 52 cm, Mourlot Printer, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Lindner, “Checkmate”, 1966, Cut-and-Paste Papers, Watercolor, Pencil, Crayon and Ink on Paper, 60.6 x 45.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art

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Hon-Chew Hee

The Artwork of Hon-Chew Hee

Born in Kahului on the Hawaiian island of Maui in January of 1906, Hon-Chew Hee was an American muralist, watercolorist and printmaker. An educator in both China and Hawaii, he founded the Chinese Art Association in 1935 and the Hawaii Watercolor Society in 1962. 

From the age of five to fourteen, Hon-Chew Hee lived with his parents in Zhongshan, Guangdong, China, where he was trained in the art of Chinese brush painting. In 1921, Hee returned to Hawaii where he continued his elementary education. He began his art education in United States in 1929 as a part-time student at the California School of Fine Art, now the San Francisco Art Institute. Completed during this period was Hee’s earliest known painting, “Spring in Southern San Francisco”, an exercise in the Western techniques of light, color and composition. Hee had the opportunity to study fresco painting under Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who had been encouraged by sculptor Ralph Stackpole and collector Albert Bender to visit San Francisco.

From 1929 until the beginning of World War II, Hee lived in San Francisco where he founded the Chinese Art Association. He entered his work in various exhibitions during this period. For the 1937 second annual National Exhibition of American Art, Hee presented his “Waimea Canyon”, a colorful canvas depicting the natural reddish canyon located on Kaua’i Island. For the March 1940 opening of New York’s Schoenemann Galleries on Madison Avenue, he had a solo exhibition of forty-three watercolors and drawings that received favorable reviews.  Single figure studies dominated this show, among these was his “Sleeping Chinese Boy”.

Hon-Chew Hee registered for the military draft in October of 1940. In October of 1945 in Honolulu, he married Marjorie Yuk Lin Wong who earned her degrees in medicine from Columbia University and the University of Hawaii. At this time, Hee was employed at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard and taught painting classes at the Nuuanu YMCA. The painter and printmaker Isami Doi was also teaching at the YMCA and instructed Hee in the art of wood engraving. In 1948, Hee entered his artwork, which included the “Farmer’s Blessing”, in the July non-jury exhibition at New York State’s  Woodstock Gallery.

After a period of study at the Art Students League in New York, Hee traveled in September of 1949 aboard the luxury liner Ile de France to Le Havre, France. He stayed in Paris for a three-year study program with Fernand Léger and Andre L’hote, both French Cubist painters, and German painter George Grosz, best known for his 1920s Berlin scenes. Hee adopted the techniques of Cubism for his 1952 “Coffee Hour” by the use of colored blocks as sections of the coffee machine. However, his work always retained a sense of realism in its use of Eastern and Western concepts that were overlaid with traditional Chinese line-work.

Upon his return to Hawaii, Hon-Chew Hee settled in Kāneʻohe, the largest of the communities on Kāneʻohe Bay of O’ahu Island, his home for the rest of his life. Hee completed six murals fot the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts as well as a set of murals for the Inter-Island Terminal of the Honolulu International Airport. He created commissioned murals for the Manoa Library, Enchanted Lake Elementary School, Maui’s Pukalani Elementary School, the Hilo Hospital, and Kauai Community College.

Hon-Chew Hee died on the island of O’ahu in 1993. The Hon-Chew Hee Estate Foundation established a scholarship in 2009 for residents of Hawaii pursuing a degree in the fine arts. Hee’s work can be found in many private collections and such public institutions as the Hawaii State Arm Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Taiwan Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. 

Second Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Coffee Hour”, 1952, Oil on Canvas, 61 x 76.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Waiting”, Date Unkniown, Oil on Canvas 40.5 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Serigraphs”, 1973, Portfolio of 30 Serigraphs, Edition of 500, Publisher Hon-Chew Hee Studio