Untitled (Two Figures)

Label

After years of working in the fashion and advertising industries, Richard Lindner created distorted and abstracted interpretations of consumer ideals. In Untitled (Two Figures), Lindner experiments with fashion drawings, giving his flattened figures large legs, disproportionate arms, miniature heads and dressing them in similarly brightly colored garments with cinched waists and geometric patterning. The figures’ bodies lack most stereotypical masculine and feminine characteristics and, instead, resemble each other in their proportions. Overtly contradicting the ideals that mass media outlets promote, Linder stimulates conversation about body image and the human form. His work comes decades before the invention of the internet and photo-editing software programs, but it remains relevant today. How do his distortions call out attention to the portrayal of male and female bodies in cotemporary mass media?

From the 2020 exhibition A Space for Dialogue 98, Vision 2020: What Do You See?, curated by Devon Mifflin '21, Levinson Intern for Campus Engagement

Exhibition History

Recent American Graphics, Art 53, Lower Jewett Corridor, Hopkins Center Art Galleries, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, April 18-May 25, 1980.

Sharon Arts Center, Peterborough, New Hampshire, August 11-September 24, 1978.

Vision 2020: What Do You See?, A Space for Dialogue 98, Devon D. Mifflin, Levinson Intern, Class of 2021, Alvin P. Gutman Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 11-March 1, 2020.

Publication History

Brian P. Kennedy and Emily Shubert Burke, Modern and Contemporary Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 2009 p.178, no.165.

Devon D. Mifflin, A Space for Dialogue 98, Vision 2020, What Do You See?, Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2020.

Provenance

Joan S. Sonnabend (1928-2011), Boston, Massachusetts; given to present collection, 1979.

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Subjects