Baal Booster

Richard Lindner's art comes on with the blaring oompah of a brass band. His subject is people--notably women. They are overripe nymphets whose hearts belong to Dada. Emblazoned in garish circus colors, more powerful than comic-book Supermen, his colossal caricatures loom like contemporary Baals.

His hard, bright images of the current scene, now on view at Manhattan's Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, make Lindner seem almost pop. But he is 65 and neo-nothing. He has successfully spanned the decades between the black Brechtian satire of his early years in pre-Hitler Germany and the machine-tempered, mass-produced present.

Lindner is a pungent social observer. His girls are garbed in the hip gear of today's pelvic underground: miniskirts, black leather vests and striped stockings. They lick ice cream cones but seldom smile. They are exotic exaggerations, vinyl Venuses in modern Threepenny Opera costumes, flagrant in their red fright wigs and monster cupid lips. His portrait of Art Patron Peggy Guggenheim has her decked out in butterfly sunglasses with bare breasts to boot.

These feminine images, however explicit, are not pornographic to him. "Woman is bursting her corsets," says Lindner, "like a prehistoric animal cracking the egg and getting out." So he portrays women bulging explosively from their clothing, like Technicolor knackwurst. They tease rather than please.

His No! depicts a redhaired teeny-bopper in a crumpled miniskirt displaying maximum legginess. Her pose of independence is amplified by a Hula Hoop pseudo halo and a background of the Stars and Stripes. Says Lindner: "I am not a woman hater or a sadist. Women who would be angels wouldn't interest me. They'd be sexless."

A German Jew who fled the Nazis, Lindner was exposed to the earthy expressionism of Max Beckmann and George Grosz, and he admired the smooth machine-surfaces with which Fernand Leger packaged reality. In the U.S., he developed an appreciation for advertising imagery as an illustrator for

FORTUNE and Harper's Bazaar. By 1950, he returned to more venturesome art in an attempt to portray the surface glitter of U.S. society. Nowadays he captures it, often by amplifying its most sordid outcroppings. But he also suggests that life is full of fantastic fury and that picturing it is more attractive than many would expect.

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