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guns stacked next to her person. Although filled with aggressive desire, this female can be seen as the victim of the sideshow. Her confrontational vulgarity and lurid get-up relate to Lindner’s later work.
Koch lived in Utrecht and began exhibiting in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Brussels in the early 1930s. It is unlikely that Lindner, though highly knowledgeable about the art of his time, would have been familiar with the Dutch artist’s work. Yet Koch’s paintings are important examples of a caustic manner of portraying the bizarre phenomena of daily life.
Lindner did know about the Bauhaus and once thought of actually attending that school. He referred particularly to Oskar Schlemmer as an artist of special interest. For Schlemmer, who belonged to the post-Expressionist generation, the human being was no longer a self-reflective, troubled individual. Rather, Schlemmer searched for a classical, uniform archetype. In his paintings, sculptures, and designs for dance, he formulated a universal, almost stereometric figure, which for him was a metaphysical paradigm of the human form. But unlike Lindner’s figures, which bear a formal relation to them, Schlemmer’s
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transcendental personages are far removed from everyday encounters and certainly do not partake of sexual adventure in an urban milieu.
One of Schlemmer’s most talented students and collaborators, Xanti Schawinsky, related his figures the contemporary world of the metropolis, to jazz, dance, and kitsch.
Schawinsky was very much impressed with dancers, such as the Tiller Girls, precursors to Busby Berkeley’s chorines who, like well-drilled soldiers in uniform, performed simultaneous mechanical movements. Schawinsky completely mechanized these girls, turning them into tapdancing machines; he actually produced a performance of these machines in his « Circus » on the Bauhaus stage in Weimar between 1924 and 1929. They anticipate Lindner’s lifeless marionettes, who appear to be alienated sex machines. There were also Hans Bellmer’s dolls and mannequins, fetish objects that violated all sexual taboos with their twisted bodies, their multiple breasts and buttocks assembled in a great variety of configurations. But Bellmer’s sadomasochistic objects of desire, with their allusions to the Freudian conflict of Eros/Thanatos, ultimately moved to excesses beyond the realm of Lindner’s painted fantasies.
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