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Lot Essay
Richard Lindner's Boy with Machine powerfully features a chubby child prodigy, a very important character in Lindner's early repertoire of strange and evocative incarnations. The child is full of his own self-importance, a monster of childhood precocity. The child's smug expression signifies immense self-satisfaction, as he stands in front of a gigantic mechanical creation he operates by pulling on a thin piece of string. Instead of representing childhood hope and innocence, Lindner's children resemble small adults. Dressed in a dark uniform of black shorts and jacket, embellished with gold braid and a high military style collar, the eponymous Boy with Machine also resembles the stark and sinister authority figures - policemen, dictators and mysterious strangers - that inhabit Lindner's universe.
Lindner achieves his canvases' richness through skillful handling of abstract and figurative elements. He hauntingly suggests characters taken from his own childhood. In Boy with Machine, Lindner does not mean to depict a real machine in the mechanical creation behind the boy, only the aura of society's ominous mechanization and the creeping effect that has on humanity. At other times, Lindner builds on the influence of European modernist masters to produce figures with the mass of Leger's legendary statuesque bodies.
Painted in 1954, against the all-encompassing backdrop of the New York School, Lindner completed Boy with Machine only a few years after he decided to give up his commercial illustration work and paint full time. It was also the year of his first solo show in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Lindner's work at this time attracted widespread critical attention, with the painter Robert Indiana describing him as 'a bridge between European Expressionism and the extreme sophistication of the American social milieu" (R. Indiana, quoted in M. Bouisset, 'Biographical Notes on Richard Lindner,' Homage to Richard Lindner, 1980, New York, p.126).
Lindner achieves his canvases' richness through skillful handling of abstract and figurative elements. He hauntingly suggests characters taken from his own childhood. In Boy with Machine, Lindner does not mean to depict a real machine in the mechanical creation behind the boy, only the aura of society's ominous mechanization and the creeping effect that has on humanity. At other times, Lindner builds on the influence of European modernist masters to produce figures with the mass of Leger's legendary statuesque bodies.
Painted in 1954, against the all-encompassing backdrop of the New York School, Lindner completed Boy with Machine only a few years after he decided to give up his commercial illustration work and paint full time. It was also the year of his first solo show in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Lindner's work at this time attracted widespread critical attention, with the painter Robert Indiana describing him as 'a bridge between European Expressionism and the extreme sophistication of the American social milieu" (R. Indiana, quoted in M. Bouisset, 'Biographical Notes on Richard Lindner,' Homage to Richard Lindner, 1980, New York, p.126).