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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Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Orange”

Ellsworth Kelly, “Blue Orange”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 40.6 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Using elements of Color Field, hard-edge painting and Minimalism, Ellsworth Kelly created a distinctive personal style of graceful, simple forms skillfully executed with an unassuming technique. He began making abstract paintings in 1949. Three years later, Kelly discovered the late work of Claude Monet and began to paint more effortlessly using large formats and monochrome colors. By the end of the 1950s, his paintings had bridged the gap between reductive Minimalism and American Geometric Abstraction.

Kelly gifted his 1957 “Blue Orange” to painter Robert Indiana. The painting, a physical memory of the bond between two iconic American painters, is inscribed on the reverse with “EK 1957 FOR ROBERT AN ORANGE PEEL FROM PIER 7”. It was Kelly who introduced Indiana to the New York City’s famed Coenties Slip area, a section of Manhattan’s financial district that became the home of many ground-breaking American artists. Finding themselves neighbors, Kelly and Indiana forged a bond that eventually turned into a close and intimate friendship that sparked their creative energy and influenced their entire careers.

In the early 1960s, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana’s relationship eventually came to an end. The heartbreak Indiana felt ultimately led him to create his iconic LOVE imagery. Designed in 1965 for the Museum of Modern Art, Indiana’s tricolor arrangement for the “LOVE” Christmas card -red, blue and green- was seemingly influenced by Kelly’s most recognizable color palette. Although born from sadness and loss, Indiana’s four-letter word became the hope and optimism that would ultimately shape his career.

Kelly’s early development was influenced by the geometric and biomorphic works of Jean and Sophie Taeber-Arp as well as the work of Henri Mattisse whose paintings he saw while living in Paris between 1949 and 1952. Kelly’s main concerns, like those of Matisse, were based on the pursuit of pure form and color. He always looked to nature for his inspiration, either through photographs he had taken of his surroundings or the simple everyday experiences of his life.

The sweeping organic shape of Kelly’s “Blue Orange” is a study in nature that is both abstracted and two-dimensional. Emitting a warm orange glow, it is both minimal, yet powerful, and perfectly formed in its simplicity. Kelly used the simple organic form of an orange peel held against a clear blue sky to create an intimate exploration of pure color and form. Until his death, Robert Indiana kept this painting in his collection- a memory of a shared experience on southern Manhattan’s Pier 7 sixty years prior.

Robert Indian passed away in his home on the nineteenth of May in 2018, just a few weeks before the opening of his sculptural retrospective at the Albright-Know Art Gallery. Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Orange” was later put up for auction at Christie’s New York and sold in November of 2018 for USD 2, 772, 500.

Insert Image: Hans Namuth, “Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly, 1958”, 1991, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Hans Namuth Estate

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly, “Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VI”, 1951, Cut and Pasted Color Coated Paper and Pencil on Four Sheets of Black Paper, 94.6 x 94.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Born in Newburgh, New York in May of 1929, Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, printmaker and a sculptor who was associated with Color Field painting, Minimalism, and the hard-edge painting style. Introduced to ornithology, the study of birds, at an early age by his grandmother, he developed a passion for form and color which he carried into his future works. Encouraged by his early teachers to pursue an artistic career, Kelly studied, starting in 1941, at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, which he attended until his induction into the Army in 1943.

Entering into military service, Kelly requested to be assigned to the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion which took many inducted artists. During World War II, he served with others in its deception unit, known as the Ghost Army, which used inflatable tanks and other elements of subterfuge, including the art of camouflage, to mislead the enemy forces. Kelly served with the unit until the end of the war’s European phase. From 1946 to 1947, he used the G.I. Bill to study at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

During his time in Boston, Ellsworth Kelly exhibited in his first group show at the Boris Mirski Gallery and taught art classes at the Norfolk House Center in Roxbury. In 1948, he moved to Paris to study at its School of Fine Arts. Kelly immersed himself in Paris’s artistic resources and met such American artists as composer John Cage and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, French surrealist artist Jean Arp and Romanian abstract sculptor Constantin Brâncuși , whose simplification of natural forms had a lasting influence on him.

In 1954 Kelly returned to the United States and settled in New York City. In May of 1956, and again in the fall of 1957, he had exhibitions at Betty Parson’s gallery. Three of Kelly’s works, “Atlantic”, “Bar” and “Painting in Three Panels”, were selected for the Whitney Museum of American Arts’s exhibition entitled “Young America 1957”; all three works were considered radically different from the other entries in the show.

Ellsworth Kelly left New York City in 1970 and settled in Spencertown, a hamlet about one hundred-thirty miles north of the city. His husband, the photographer Jack Shear, joined him in 1984. Kelly worked in a twenty-thousand square foot extended studio in Spencertown until 2005. At that time, the couple moved to a small 1815 colonial house which they shared until Kelly’s death in December of 2015, at the age of ninety-two.

Ellsworth Kelly made his first abstract paintings in 1949. His 1950 “Seine”, consisting of black and white rectangles arranged by chance, was inspired by the dispersal of light on the surface of water. This was followed by a series of eight collages in 1951 entitled “Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I to VIII”, produced by using number slips of different colors arranged on a large square grid. Kelly’s work gradually increased in size and became more abstract with a focus on shape and masses of color on the canvas plane.

Starting in the 1960s, Kelly started painting on angular and, later, shaped canvases; the first shaped work was his 1966 “Yellow Piece”. His 1968 “Green White” marks the first appearance of the triangle in his work, a shape which reoccurs throughout his career. In 1971, Kelly produced a series of fourteen paintings entitled “Chatham Series”, each painting consisting of two panels painted in balancing monochrome colors and joined together. In 1979, he used curves in two-color paintings made of separate panels. In his later works Kelly distilled his palette and worked on rectangular panels of many coats of white, on top of which is placed a shaped black canvas.

An artist of many mediums and styles, Ellsworth Kelly produced many drawings of plants from the late 1940s onward. In the 1960s, he took up printmaking and, from 1964 to 1966, produced his “Suite of Twenty-Seven Lithographs”, during his stay in Paris. His 1988 “Purple/Red/Gray/Orange” at eighteen feet in length may be the largest single-sheet lithograph ever made. From 1959 onwards, Kelly made freestanding folded sculptures; in 1973 for his large-scale outdoor sculptures, he switched mediums to steel, aluminum, or bronze. Kelly produced a total of one hundred and forty sculptures in his lifetime.

Top Insert Image: Onni Saari, “Ellsworth Kelly in his Broad Steet Studio, New York”, 1956, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Ellsworth Kelly, “Colors for a Large Wall”, 1951, Oil on Sixty Four Canvas Panels, 240 x 240 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Third Insert Image: Ellsworth Kelly, “Spectrum IV”, Oil on Thirteen Canvas Panels, 297.2 x 297.2 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Ellsworth Kelly, “Meschers”, 1951, Oil on Camvas, 149.9 x 149.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York