Robert Indiana was one of the preeminent figures in American art since the 1960s. A self-proclaimed “American painter of signs”, Indiana created a highly original body of work that explores American identity, personal history, and the power of abstraction and language, establishing an important legacy that resonated in the work of many contemporary artists.
Background
Robert Indiana was born in New Castle, Indiana on September 13, 1928. He was adopted as an infant by Earl Clark and Carmen Watters Clark and named Robert Earl Clark. He grew up in a financially unstable environment, as his father held a wide range of jobs, from an oil executive to pumping gas. When Indiana was nine, his parents divorced and his mother went to work; her time as a diner waitress would be influential to Indiana's artistic career. A free spirit, his mother frequently moved; by age seventeen, Indiana had lived in twenty-one different locations.
Education
Indiana's early interest in art was initially encouraged by his first-grade teacher, who thrilled him when she asked to keep a few of his drawings because she knew he would be a famous artist one day. Forty years later, Indiana visited this teacher who showed him the saved drawings; he then signed them again as a successful artist.
Graduating high school in 1946, Indiana enlisted in the US Air Force, intending to fund his college studies through the G.I. Bill. In 1949, with his service complete, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago and also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland before earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1954.
Although Indiana originally planned to settle in Chicago upon his return from Europe in 1954, his lack of funds kept him in New York. Once there, his job at an art supply store led to a fortuitous 1956 meeting with the artist Ellsworth Kelly who entered the store to purchase a postcard that Indiana had used in a window display. The two became romantically involved and Kelly both encouraged him to move to the Coenties Slip area of lower Manhattan and to begin creating hard-edge paintings.
The move, which brought him into a community of artists, proved highly influential to Indiana's work. Discarded materials, including metal, wheels, and pieces of wood, from the neighborhood's abandoned shipyards and warehouses were used to make some of his earliest "herms" sculptures. The discovery of a box of 19th century brass stencils in a friend's loft inspired him to include his first words into his works. These materials would define Indiana's approach and give him the tools to integrate the ordinary and common into a history of fine art; words became a way to layer meaning and to blend the personal with the universal. Taken with understanding American identity, especially through popular culture, the artist redefined himself, changing his last name to "Indiana" in honor of his home state.
Words became a prominent theme in Indiana's work. While his graphic style and use of popular language were similar to the artists of the new Pop art movement, Indiana was uncomfortable with this label. He did interact with the group, including an appearance in Andy Warhol's 35-minute film “Eat” (1963) (which featured Indiana eating one single mushroom), but ultimately, Indiana distinguished himself from the main Pop movement through the autobiographical nature of his work and in creating art that overtly addressed contemporary political and social themes, such as the struggle for Civil Rights.
In 1966, Indiana exhibited his first "LOVE" works, which featured the word itself, stacked in two rows with the "O" slightly tilted. While simple, the word made a powerful statement at a time of national and international unrest. Embraced the world over, "LOVE" proved a source of inspiration even for John Lennon. While viewing an exhibition of Indiana's prints, Lennon responded to a comment that love was surrounding him by replying "All you need is love." This statement would amplify Indiana's message, becoming the title for the Beatle's hit song in 1967 and an indelible and still-popular slogan.
Proud to be "a people's painter," Indiana is proficient in many media. In addition to his well-known sculpted versions of LOVE, he has made prints and posters, designed costumes and sets for the opera “The Mother of Us All”, and even created the floor design for the Milwaukee, Wisconsin's MECCA Arena basketball court in 1997.
A fiercely private person, Indiana moved to Maine's remote Vinalhaven Island in 1978. Despite his physical retreat, his work is still deeply inspired by contemporary events and activist in nature. In response to September 11, he created the painting “Afghanistan” (2001) and boarded up the windows on the first floor of his home to paint them with images of the American flag. America's 2003 invasion of Iraq inspired his “Peace Paintings” series. In 2008, Indiana made an artistic statement of support for Barack Obama's presidential campaign with the print HOPE, created in the same graphic style as his "LOVE" works.
Indiana's importance as an artist was affirmed in 2013 with a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was his first major show in New York City, and it marked a coming home of sorts for the artist. He died on May 19, 2018, at his home in Vinalhaven, Maine, of respiratory failure at the age of 89. One day before his death, a lawsuit was filed over claims that his caretaker had isolated him from family and friends, and was marketing unauthorized reproductions of his works.
Indiana’s artwork has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, and his works are in the permanent collections of important museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, the Museum Ludwig in Vienna, Austria, the Shanghai Art Museum in China, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He has also been included in numerous international publications and is the subject of a number of monographs.
(Catalogue published on the occasionof the exhibition of R...)
Politics
Political and social engagement also inspired Indiana’s later career. In the first decade of this century he responded to terrorist attacks and Middle Eastern invasions with such images as "Afghanistan" (2001) and the "Peace series" (2003), while during the run-up to Barack Obama’s election as US president in 2008, Indiana projected the configuration of Love on to a related sentiment, Hope.
Views
Although acknowledged as a leader of Pop, Indiana distinguished himself from his Pop peers by addressing important social and political issues and incorporating profound historical and literary references into his works. His work integrates non-art materials, ordinary language, and commercially-inspired graphic designs with more traditional elements of fine art, elevating the viewer's daily experience and folding it into a history of art and American identity. Overtly political and socially engaged, Indiana interrogated consumerism and mass culture, explicitly criticizing ideals treated more ambiguously by most Pop artists.
Quotations:
“Oddly enough, I wasn't thinking at all about anticipating the love generation and hippies. It was a spiritual concept. It isn't a sculpture of love any longer. It's become the very theme of love itself.”
“Pop is either hardcore or hard-edge. I am hard-edge pop.”
Personality
The painter and sculptor liked to go on spontaneous hunts for material, wandering downtown and visiting various warehouses and sheds.
Interests
Artists
Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and Edward Hopper
Connections
Robert Indiana never was married and had no children.