Richard Lindner (1901-1978), a German-born refugee from Nazi oppression who settled in New York, created a bold and deeply disturbing body of work completely at odds with that city's vanguard of the 195Os. A former commercial artist, Lindner drew on personal memory and his emigre cultural heritage to fashion images of a bizarre and lurid humanity. Grotesque children, automaton couples, and denizens of the urban underworld populate his canvases.

While his bold, precision-tooled figurative paintings found an appreciative audience in the 196Os with the advent of Pop Art, Lindner nonetheless remained a resolutely independent artist whose paintings speak to the alienation and moral crises of this century and evoke the absurdity of the human condition.

Richard Lindner: Paintings and Watercolors, 1948-1977 includes 73 oil paintings and watercolors in full color, some of which have never before been exhibited or published. The book is based on the first exhibition of Lindner's work in a generation, organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which reexamines Lindner's life and traces the unfolding thematic content of his art from the late 194Os until his death in 1978.

Essays are by organizing curator Judith Zilczer, Curator of Paintings at the Hirshhorn Museum, and Peter Selz, Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Zilczer explores the biographical and cultural sources for Lindner's figurative symbolism, while Professor Selz analyzes Lindner's controversial images of women.