The Meeting

“A dazzling memoir, beautifully written… a dance of tenderness, wryness, honesty, emotional and intellectual commitment.” –Michèle Roberts, author of The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House, shortlisted for the Booker Prize (remarks from interview with Lindner at Jewish Book Week, London)

“The Meeting is an incredibly satisfying journey of investigation. The heroic effort to assemble a family history, to reconstruct her uncle, Richard Lindner, like a scientist, at arms length, presenting a larger, more encompassing picture of who he was, not only for herself but for all of us. As a teacher, Richard encouraged his students to put down their pencils and really look at their subject. To really see what they were studying. As Elsbeth really looked at the remarkable histories and lives of her family, Elsbeth could see, appreciate, respect, and love what they were looking at, and gift it to us.” –Nancy Grossman

“In Elsbeth Lindner’s book about her Uncle Richard she paints as crisp a portrait with words as did her Uncle with paint and line. Like the writer, I lament Richard Lindner’s absence from the art-world’s center stage. Richard is among that bright band of painters that do not fit the art historians’ ‘isms’. He decried being boxed in by POP Art. He was an outlier–an outsider–like Stanley Spencer, Steinberg, Hieronymus Bosch, Frank Auerbach, Ray Johnson, Mae Wilson, Marisol …… he was among the misfits, singularities, originals.” –Jann Haworth

“Richard Lindner was an artist of extraordinary gentleness whose work dealt almost exclusively in cruelty. His imagery fixed on the bizarre low-life of his native Germany transmuted into sinister American nightmares drenched in garish New York colors. With stiletto precision he shaped male and female figures of supreme hostility whose encounters produced a ferocious sexuality. No other 20th-century painter has depicted women with greater fanaticism or greater eroticism. A savage lust informs their monumental geography, and the promise of their embrace implies instant annihilation. And yet Lindner saw these rapacious creatures as mythic goddesses-sacred be-ings consumed by secret desires. Dressed in outrageous garb or seen in terrifying naked-ness, they emerge as fantasy figures of un-thinkable potency. Their icy grandeur creates a devouring heat, and the men seen within this ambiguous climate seem them-selves enthralled by the voyeuristic dramas which Lindner invented with such cool…. The works he created will remain a disturbing and unique testament of an art-ist’s superb craftsmanship, originality and vision.”–John Gruen, ARTNews, Summer 1978

Elsbeth Lindner has had a distinguished career in British publishing, notably with Methuen, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and The Women’s Press. She was a member of the Orange Prize management committee, editor of newbooks magazine and a 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction judge. Elsbeth Lindner presented on BBC Radio 4 National Arts Show and was selected as a featured speaker at Jewish Book Week. She now lives in the United States.

Judith Zilczer, Curator Emerita of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, has organized more than two dozen exhibitions and published widely on modern and contemporary art. Her essays have appeared in Art Bulletin, American Art, Art Journal, Archives of American Art Journal, artibus et historiae, and The Oxford Art Journal. She is the recipient of the Award for Best Exhibition of Time-Based Art, International Association of Art Critics (2005) and the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award of the Art Libraries Society of North America (2006). She is the author of The Noble Buyer: John Quinn Patron of the Avant-Garde (1978), Richard Lindner: Paintings and Watercolors, 1948-1977 (1996), Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (2005), and A Way of Living: The Art of Willem de Kooning (2014, 2nd ed. 2017, 3rd ed. 2023). She serves on the editorial board of The Woman’s Art Journal.

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