Richard Lindner (1901 -1978) left Germany for Paris in 1933, earning his living as a commercial artist, being interned in 1939 and then serving in the French and British Armies until he left for America in 1941. His parents, an affluent bourgeois Jewish family ran a corsetry firm in Nurembourg, a theme which recurs regularly throughout his work. Initially he studied the piano at the Conservatory in that city.

Arriving in America, his experience in commercial art and in publishing attracted many clients to his studio. He became an American citizen in 1948. As well as FORTUNE, he illustrated for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.After a flourishing career as a book and magazine illustrator he gravitated after 1952 towards sexy heraldic paintings which in themselves were an influence on the development of Pop Art.

Whereas there is considerable and enduring interest in his studio works, his commercial work repays much attention, exploring the themes he was subsequnetly known for, in the public arena.

Studio International 1968, No 906, "Richard Lindner leads a retired life with his work in his penthouse on 69th Street. He is intelligent and witty, delicately built and elegant. He observes astutely and formulates precisely. We shall understand the nature of this man better knowing that he owns a big collection of everyday as well as unusual toys, gathered from all the corners of the world and assembled carefully on shelves in his bachelor’s apartment. There are dolls and masks, clocks and bells, photographs and fetishes, artists and motorcyclists, a clown on a unicycle and a rider on horseback, men at the billiard table and a gymnast on a ladder, wind-up bird and tiger with wide-open jaws showing his teeth....He lived for more than two decades in Nürnberg where his parents moved from the cool and sober Hamburg a few months after his birth. In Nürnberg he spent his childhood and played his first games; here he saw in the Germanische Museum the witches of Hans Baldung Grien, here he began to study fine arts at the Kunsigewerbeschule. Nürnberg, city of toys and torture chambers, honey cakes and racks, tin soldiers and pogroms, Albrecht Durer and Hans Sachsn, humanism and schoolmasterliness, traditional ‘Gemütlichkeit’ and medieval dungeons – this Nürnberg moulded him decisively. He always thought Nürnberg to be a terrible city. It has to become the background for the Reichsparteitage (Nazi Party conventions) and the Nürnberg laws (against Jewry), events which affected Lindner’s and millions of others’ lives more horribly than any previous discriminatory decrees, even during the Reformation. This is the very city, within the walls of which some of the most beautiful and most touching works of art are kept, where more phantasy and inventiveness were put to the production of toys, than in any other city of the world!.

Art and Antiques Magazine, May 2009 Peter Selz writes "Lindner was thoroughly versed in European art and remained a European artist in exile. He adored New York, which he took as the theme of his work. Shortly before he died, he told the American critic John Gruen, “My work is really a reflection of Germany of the ’20s. It was the only time the Germans were any good. On the other hand, my creative nourishment comes from New York and from pictures I see in American magazines and on television. America is really a fantastic place.” And it is these places of American fantasy—Hollywood, Disneyland, Las Vegas, Times Square, Coney Island—that make up the world of his pictures."