{"id":847,"date":"2020-11-24T19:03:34","date_gmt":"2020-11-24T19:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/cfam\/?p=847"},"modified":"2020-11-25T15:35:18","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T15:35:18","slug":"richard-lindners-funhouse-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/rma\/2020\/11\/24\/richard-lindners-funhouse-new-york\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Lindner\u2019s Funhouse New York"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the painter Wolf Kahn\u2019s dramatic escape from Germany<\/a> on the eve of World War II. This week, I came across a similar story, this one from Kahn\u2019s slightly older colleague Richard Lindner. Lindner, who was born to a German-Jewish father and an American mother in Hamburg in 1901, grew up in Nuremberg, eventually becoming a successful commercial artist in Munich and then Berlin. He especially loved Berlin, which during the Weimar years was a center for a freewheeling caf\u00e9 culture that Lindner described as fantastic, scandalous, decadent, and even sinister. The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in 1933 caused Lindner to leave Germany almost at once. Lindner lived in Paris from 1933 to the German invasion of France in 1940, when he was interned by the French government alongside other German nationals. He escaped the internment camp by enlisting in the French Army. Soon accused of being a German spy, narrowly escaping execution before fleeing on foot across the French border with Spain, he eventually ended up in Lisbon, where he got a ticket to the United States based on his American ancestry. He arrived in New York on March 17, 1941.1<\/sup> Lindner immediately took to New York, treasuring it and other American fantasylands like Disneyland and Las Vegas.2<\/sup> Once he was in New York, Lindner continued to work as a commercial illustrator before finally achieving his desire to become a painter in middle age.3<\/sup> As he did so, the city became his primary subject matter, and he represented it as a colorful, madcap, funhouse version of itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n