The Meeting (The Life and Family of Artist Richard Lindner)

Documented through letters, reports and exhibition reviews, this beautifully-written, illustrated account of a family dispersed by war and shattered by the Holocaust foregrounds two brothers' lives rebuilt in the aftermath of horrific events, one who became a groundbreaking painter.

The diverging paths of two surviving brothers from a German Jewish family, Richard and Arthur Lindner, are traced by Arthur’s daughter, who recounts her father's exile to an Australian internment camp and his family’s eventual settlement in England alongside the story of Richard’s life as an artist in Paris, later imprisoned in Nazi-occupied France. Securing release through art-world connections, Richard would emigrate to New York and go on to world-renown with his artwork collected by major museums around the United States and throughout Europe, including MoMA, the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim, Tate, Pompidou, and the National Gallery of American Art, and retrospectives at the Chicago Museum of Art and Hirshhorn in Washington DC.

Richard Lindner’s influence on the development of the Pop Art movement in the 1960s cemented him as an artistic and cultural icon. Shaped by Cubism and Surrealism from his time in Paris, with a strong influence of German Expressionism, his use of bold color and provocative contemporary figures created a distinct visual language that captured the American zeitgeist. Although he would come to reject the association of his work with Pop Art artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, his work, which often depicted ferocious and overtly-sexualized figures of 1930s German nightlife, was instead identified with the urban street scene of 1960s New York. For his niece, his icon status was cemented in 1967 when he was pictured on The Beatles’ infamous album cover for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Each brother’s personal striving, relationships forged and fractured, assimilation (or its absence), and even a little humor animate the book. Elsbeth Lindner’s investigation of her uncle’s career and psyche, and the impact of the older generation’s trauma leads to a clearer understanding of her own identity and affinity for her uncle.