New Yorkers have become complacent in the knowledge that their city is the capital of the art world. Manhattan is the center of the business of art, and there are, lest we forget, a daunting number of artists who work there. Nonetheless, there is a nagging sense that this may not always be the case. Recently, there has been a spate of important, and probably definitive, museum exhibitions in the United States that did not travel to the Big Apple. Monet and Degas in Chicago, Brancusi and CΓ©zanne in Philadelphia, and Vermeer in Washington have, to a degree, undermined New Yorkβs standing. Not a few New Yorkers have wondered why these shows didnβt make it to a more appropriate (and convenient) locationβsay, the upper East Side. The Vermeer exhibition, in particular, has caused many an acquaintance who couldnβt make the trek to rue having missed it.
The painter Richard Lindner (1901β1978) isnβt in a class with Vermeerβwho is?βbut it is unfortunate all the same that his retrospective, the first in almost twenty years, will not travel to New York. This is unfortunate for two reasons. First, Lindner was a good, if unnerving, painter whose oeuvredeserves more recognition than it currently receives from the New York art establishment. Second, his paintings, drawings, and watercolors are so much of Manhattan that it is a shame they wonβt be shown there. Having arrived as an Γ©migrΓ© to the United States in 1941, the German-born Lindner claimed his status as, not an