Richard Lindner was an American-German artist known for his bizarrely erotic portraits which meld human figures with machine-like elements. With their bold outlines and stretches of gradient color, Lindner’s figures are reminiscent of those by Fernand Léger. The artist’s 1954 painting Boy with Machine was famously used by the French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s as the cover of their book Anti-Oedipus (1972). “An artist must remain a child, with an interest in unimportant things,” he once said. Born on November 11, 1901 in Hamburg, Germany, his family moved to the city of Nuremberg in 1905, where his mother ran a boutique corset shop. A talented musician as a youth, Lindner’s interest...