(b. September 13, 1928, New Castle, Indiana – d. May 19. 2018, Vinalhaven, Maine)
The Farnsworth Museum trustees and staff mourn the passing of renowned artist and friend, Bob Indiana. The artist’s work is on view in the Morehouse Rotunda and in Micah Gallery.
Left, photograph by John Ardoin, image courtesy of the artist. Right, photograph by Joel Page/ Associated Press, featured in Indiana’s New York Times obituary.
We invite you to express your thoughts in the space provided below. Bob Indiana was interested in the power of words and the meaning of numbers in his art. Create your own work inspired by your favorite words and numbers. Don’t forget to sign your name!
By
Robert Indiana’s Best: A Mini Retrospective
Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana at an early exhibition of Mr. Indiana’s work in New York City. CreditWilliam John Kennedy, via KIWI Arts Group May 23, 2018
From Herman Melville to Mae West, pinball machines to a slave ship, Robert Indiana drew inspiration for his art from American sources that had deeply personal meanings. Perhaps no one has a better understanding of those associations than Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art who organized the retrospective of Mr. Indiana’s work, “Beyond Love,” in 2013-14, that rediscovered his career. These are her appraisals of some of her favorite works by the artist.
The Triumph of Tira, 1960-61
Credit2018 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Sheldon Museum of Art, Nebraska Art Association
Mr. Indiana linked this painting with the performance of Mae West, his favorite movie star from childhood, as Tira the lion tamer in “I’m No Angel” (1933). But the words “law,” “cat,” “men,” and “sex” in the piece alluded equally to the perils of homosexuality in an age when sodomy
was illegal, and served as a coded reference to the gay community, of which Mr. Indiana was a part.
The Calumet, 1961
Credit2018 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
More than any other artist of his generation, Mr. Indiana identified himself as an American. To this end, he worked in what he felt was a quintessentially American style — hard-edge and polychromatic — and allied himself with American writers and painters from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1961-62, he declared his bond with his literary past by stenciling sentences onto his paintings from canonical novels and poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. This painting, his first literary work, drew from the opening chapter of Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), in which warriors from Native American tribes are called together and urged to forgo war in favor of peace.
The American Dream, 1, 1961
Credit2018 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York
This work is the first in a series of paintings in which Mr. Indiana addressed the ambiguities of the American dream. By situating ideas associated with gambling, such as “take all” and “tilt,” alongside kinetic imagery suggestive of the flashing lights and neon glare of pinball and slot machines, Mr. Indiana celebrates the promise and fantasy of
American prosperity while also acknowledging the failures of American ethics.
The Black Diamond American Dream #2, 1962
Credit2018 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon
Here Mr. Indiana harnessed the cheerful and reassuring language of mass advertising and the visual cacophony of roadside gambling establishments to communicate a message that was simultaneously dark and celebratory. With its flat, high-keyed color and hard-edge, staccato forms, the painting evoked both the pains and joys of American life,
openly acknowledging what Mr. Indiana called “all the meaner aspects of life” while testifying to America as “the best of all possible worlds.”
The Demuth American Dream #5, 1963
Credit2018 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
In this painting, Mr. Indiana allied himself with both America’s literary and visual past by paying dual homage to Charles Demuth and William Carlos Williams, whose poem “The Great Figure” (1921) Demuth had
memorialized in his painting “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” (1928). Mr. Indiana saw Demuth as a precursor — an artist who had worked in a crisp Precisionist style and used words and numbers symbolically. Drawing his image of the figure five directly from Demuth’s composition, Mr. Indiana inscribed “1928” and “1963” in his painting’s center panel to indicate the years in which Demuth and he completed their respective works. He placed the four other panels in the shape of a cross to symbolize the head, arms and feet of the human body, as well as the division of the world into four elements: existence, love, survival and sin, as conveyed by the words “die,” “hug,” “eat” and “err.”
The Rebecca, 1962
“The Rebecca,� from 1962, by Robert Indiana.Credit2018 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Private Collection
Throughout his career, Mr. Indiana used his art to address political and ethical issues, particularly those involving civil rights and peace. This painting calls attention to the legacy of racial injustice in America, as epitomized by the slave ship Rebecca. After depositing African slaves in
Cuba in the 19th century, the ship loaded provisions near what would become Mr. Indiana’s neighborhood, Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan.
The Green Diamond Eat/The Red Diamond Die, 1962
Credit2018 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Credit2018 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
The words “eat” and “die” held deeply personal meanings for Mr. Indiana — from the ubiquitous “EAT” signs that adorned diners in the Midwest to his mother’s last words to him before dying: “Have you had enough to eat?” Yet the two words also express something so fundamental about the life cycle that they need no interpretation. Their declarations of rage, triumph, fear and warning possess a directness and universality that Mr. Indiana likened to the Ten Commandments.
LOVE, 1966 (Sculpture)
Credit2018 Morgan Art Foundation, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Materials Conservation LLC
Mr. Indiana first created this now-famous design as a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. He submitted the design in four different color combinations, and the museum chose the most chromatically intense: red, blue and green. Mr. Indiana’s associations with the word “love” were ambiguous. His family had never used it, and, from all accounts, his adult relationships had made him wary of the fragility and precariousness of love. “Love is a dangerous commodity — fraught with peril,” he said. LOVE’s tilted “O,” which threatens to fall off the otherwise stable design, implicitly critiqued the often hollow sentimentality associated with the word, metaphorically suggesting unrequited longing and disappointment rather than saccharine affection. Yet what ultimately makes the image so powerful and resilient
is its ability to contain multiple, even contradictory, meanings simultaneously. A version of this article appears in print on May 24, 2018, on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Looking Back at Robert Indiana’s Best.
Biography Robert Indiana, one of the preeminent figures in American art since the 1960s, has played a central role in the development of assemblage art, hard-edge painting and Pop art. A self proclaimed “American painter of signs,” Indiana has 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 resonates in the work of many contemporary artists who make the written word a central element of their oeuvre. Robert Indiana in his studio at 25 Robert Indiana was born Robert Coenties Slip, 1959. Clark in New Castle, Indiana on PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN ARDOIN. September 13, 1928. Adopted as ©JOHN ARDOIN. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST. an infant, he spent his childhood moving frequently throughout his namesake state. His artistic talent was evident at an early age, and its recognition by a first grade teacher encouraged his decision to become an artist. In 1942 Indiana moved to Indianapolis in order to attend Arsenal Technical High School, known for its strong arts curriculum. After graduating he spent three years in the U.S. Air Force and then studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in Maine, and the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.
In 1956, two years after moving to New York, Indiana met Ellsworth Kelly, and upon his recommendation took up residence in Coenties Slip, once a major port on the southeast tip of Manhattan. There he joined a community of artists
that would come to include Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and Jack Youngerman. The environment of the Slip had a profound impact on Indiana’s work, and his early paintings include a series of hard-edge double ginkgo leaves inspired by the trees which grew in nearby Jeannette Park. He also incorporated the ginkgo form into his 19-foot mural Stavrosis (1958), a crucifixion pieced together from forty-four sheets of paper that he found in his loft. It was upon completion of this work that Indiana adopted the name of his native state as his own. Indiana, like some of his fellow artists, scavenged the area’s abandoned warehouses for materials, creating sculptural assemblages from old wooden beams, rusted metal wheels, and other remnants of the shipping trade that had thrived in Coenties Slip. While he created hanging works such as Jeanne d’Arc (1960) and Wall of China (1960), the majority were freestanding constructions which Indiana called “herms” after the sculptures that served as boundary markers at crossroads in ancient Greece and Rome. The discovery of 19th century brass stencils led to the incorporation of brightly colored numbers and short emotionally charged words onto these sculptures as well as canvases, and became the basis of his new painterly vocabulary. Indiana quickly gained repute as one of the most creative artists of his generation, and was featured in influential New York shows such as New Forms – New Media at the Martha Jackson Gallery (1960), Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art (1961), and The New Realists at the
Robert Indiana's herms in his Coenties Slip studio, ca.1960. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN ARDOIN. © JOHN ARDOIN. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
Sidney Janis Gallery (1962). In 1961, the Museum of Modern Art acquired The American Dream, I (1961), the first in a series of paintings exploring the illusory American Dream, establishing Indiana as one of the most significant members of the new generation of Pop artists who were eclipsing the prominent painters of the New York School. 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. American literary references appear in paintings such as The Calumet (1961) and Melville (1961), exhibited in 1962 in Indiana’s first New York solo exhibition, held at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. In 1964 Indiana accepted Philip Johnson’s invitation to design a new work for the New York State Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, creating a 20-foot EAT sign composed of flashing lights, and collaborated with Andy Warhol on the film Eat, a silent portrait of Indiana eating a mushroom in his Coenties Slip studio. His first European solo exhibition took place in 1966 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, Germany, and featured his Numbers (1965), a series of paintings on a theme that he has explored in various formats throughout his career. 1966 marked a turning point in Indiana’s career with the success of his LOVEimage, which had been featured in a solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery. The word love, a theme central to Indiana’s work, first appeared in the painting Four Star Love (1961). Love is a subject of great spiritual significance for the artist, illustrated by the painting Love Is God (1964), which was inspired by an inscription in the Christian Science churches he attended in his youth. Initially experimenting with a composition of stacked letters in a series of 1964 rubbings, Indiana subsequently turned this inventive design, a formal departure from his previous works, into different hard-edged color variations on canvas. Indiana’s LOVE, selected by the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 for their Christmas card, quickly permeated wider popular culture, and was adopted as an emblem of the “Love Generation.” Appearing on a best-selling United States Postal Service stamp (1973) and reproduced on countless unauthorized products, the proliferation of the image led, on one hand, to negative criticism and incorrect assumptions of the artist as a sell-out. However, the image’s popularity more importantly emphasizes its great
resonance with large and diverse audiences, and has become an icon of modern art. The universality of the subject, to which Indiana continues to return, is further evidenced by his translation of LOVE into AHAVA (Hebrew) and AMOR (Spanish). In 1978, Indiana chose to remove himself from the New York art world. He settled on the remote island of Vinalhaven in Maine, moving into the Star of Hope, a Victorian building that had previously served as an Odd Fellows Lodge. After a period spent setting up his home and new studio, Indiana turned to themes that related to his local experience, working on a suite of eighteen large-scale paintings known as The Hartley Elegies (1989-94), inspired by the German Officer paintings of Marsden Hartley, who lived on Vinalhaven in the summer of 1938. He also used found objects to create sculptures such as Ash (1985) and Mars (1990), works that reflected his new surroundings while also making reference to his past, and returned to and expanded upon his seminal American Dream series, completing The Ninth American Dream in 2001. In addition to being a painter and sculptor, Indiana has created a significant number of prints, among them the Numbers Portfolio (1968), a collaboration with the poet Robert Creeley, as well as many other works of graphic art, including the poster for the opening of the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center (1964), and the poster for the opening exhibition of the Hirshhorn Museum of Art (1974). He designed the stage sets and costumes for the Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein opera The Mother of Us All, which was presented in 1967 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and expanded in 1976 for the Santa Fe Opera in honor of the Bicentennial. Indiana has also created other unique projects, such as the design for a basketball court at the Milwaukee Exposition Convention Center Arena in 1977. 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, D.C., 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. robertindiana.com/biography
Robert Indiana mixed paint in front of a design for a poster for the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center in 1964. CreditRobert Walker/The New York Times
By Jori Finkel May 21, 2018
Robert Indiana, the Pop artist whose bold rendering of the word “love” became one of the most recognizable artworks of the 20th century, gracing hundreds of prints, paintings and sculptures, some 330 million postage stamps that he authorized and countless tchotchkes that he did not, died on Saturday at his home in Vinalhaven, Me. He was 89.
His lawyer, James W. Brannan, said the cause was respiratory failure. Mr. Indiana’s famous image features the word L-O-V-E rendered in colorful capital letters, with the first two letters stacked on top of the other two, and the letter “O” tilted as if it were being swept off its feet. Since he designed the earliest versions, in the 1960s, the logo has acquired a life of its own, appearing on everything from posters and album covers to T-shirts and jewelry. Mr. Indiana called it the 20th century’s “most plagiarized work of art,” and he kept a collection of knockoffs in his home, a historic Victorian building, to prove it. To be sure, he had a hand in spreading the word, creating many artworks in different mediums based on the motif. And he designed the red, blue and green version that was originally issued as an eight-cent stamp by the United States Postal Service for Valentine’s Day 1973. It has since become one of the most popular holiday stamps in the United States. But Mr. Indiana often pointed out that he received a flat fee of only $1,000 for his stamp design. And he frequently complained that the runaway success of “Love” ruined his reputation in the New York art world.
The O in a “Love” sculpture being lowered into place at the entrance to Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street.CreditDon Hogan Charles/The New York Times
“He was an artist of consequence who gets mistaken for a one-hit wonder,” Maxwell Anderson, the former director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art, said in an interview for this obituary in 2008. Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art who organized the 2013 retrospective “Robert Indiana: Beyond Love,” said, “There’s a new wave of critics today who are reappraising Indiana in the context of Pop Art, seeing how he inflects it with the darker side of the American dream.” She added: “The work he did in the ’60s in particular is very powerful, both dark and celebratory, with layers of autobiographical and cultural references. It’s not this superficial, optimistic, clichéd work that some people associate with his monumental sculpture.” Questions of authenticity continued to swirl around Mr. Indiana at the very end. The day before he died, a company that said it was Mr. Indiana’s
longtime agent and had the rights to some of his important works sued a New York art publisher and a man who had become his caretaker, accusing them of forging Indiana pieces and selling them. The publisher said all the works were authorized, and the caretaker did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Indiana, who retreated to Vinalhaven, a remote island, decades ago to escape the New York art scene, had grown reclusive in his final years. Some longtime friends and business associates said their efforts to contact him had been unavailing, or had been put off by his caretaker, who said Mr. Indiana was not able to see them.
A “Love” sculpture in John F. Kennedy Plaza, commonly known as Love Park, in Philadelphia. CreditMatt Rourke/Associated Press
Born in New Castle, Ind., on Sept. 13, 1928, Robert Indiana was the only child of Earl Clark and Carmen Watters and grew up as Robert Clark. He often described his early life as hardscrabble, noting that he had moved 21 times within the state of Indiana by the age of 17. His mother “couldn’t bear to live in one house longer than a year,” he said in an interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. His family’s financial struggles, shaped by the Depression, also contributed. After losing his job at Western Oil, his father managed a gas
station and also pumped gas before finding another administrative job at Phillips 66. His parents divorced before he was a teenager. Prized for his drawing skills as early as the first grade, Mr. Indiana was not especially interested in the oil industry, but he later said that he had been mesmerized by the bold neon signs at gas stations. He graduated from Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis as valedictorian of his class and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on the G.I. Bill after three years in the Air Force (known as the Army Air Forces when he began his service). In 1954 he moved to New York to start his career as an artist. He worked at an art supply store on West 57th Street, where he was putting a Matisse postcard in the window when the painter Ellsworth Kelly came in and asked about it. They began talking and later became lovers. Mr. Kelly helped him find a loft on Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, which, when it was still receiving ships, rated a mention on the first page of “Moby-Dick.” The seaport figured heavily in Mr. Indiana’s early sculptures. He used repurposed wood masts from ships, beams from old waterfront buildings and 19th-century stencils found in his loft to make a series of enigmatic assemblages that he called herms, after the classical figures. Most had human dimensions, rising to heights exceeding five feet. Some also had priapic pegs in front. (A fan of Herman Melville, he stenciled “Ahab” on one.)
Mr. Indiana at his studio in Vinalhaven, Maine in 2008. Mr. Indiana, who in the 1960s created the pop icon “Love,” produced a similar image with the work “hope” for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. CreditJoel Page/Associated Press
It was on Coenties Slip that he met neighboring artists like Jack Youngerman, Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly, with whom he shared his studio for a time. And it was there that he adopted Indiana as a sort of stage name, widely read as a celebration of his ties to the American heartland.
A particular sort of peppy, Midwestern-seeming earnestness soon became a central theme in his work, as in his 1961 oil painting “The American Dream #1,” in which four flat, colorful discs contain signs like “tilt” and “take all.” Alfred Barr Jr., who acquired that work for the Museum of Modern Art, called it “spellbinding” but admitted, “I don’t understand why I like it so much.” Mr. Indiana himself called it “a comment on the superficiality of American life.” The critic Lawrence Alloway called it “Pop poetry of the highway.” Ms. Haskell, at the Whitney, described his use of language as one of his most important contributions, anticipating the many artists who manipulate words today. “It’s very different than, say, Johns, who embedded words in gestural brush strokes,” she said, referring to the artist Jasper Johns. “Here words are the content.” Several of Mr. Indiana’s paintings revolve around monosyllabic action words like “eat,” “hug” or “die," a rather direct, bare-bones alternative to the sophisticated exhortations of Madison Avenue. In 1964, at the New York World’s Fair, he installed a flashing 20-foot electric sign that read “Eat”; it was unplugged almost immediately because it drew too many tourists looking for a bite.
Wood sculptures, which Mr. Indiana called herms, from 1960-62 at the 2013 show “Robert
Indiana: Beyond Love,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.CreditLinda Rosier for The New York Times
That year he also starred in the Andy Warhol film of the same name, which featured Mr. Indiana very slowly and languorously eating a mushroom. Then came “love.” Although few fans seem familiar with the background, the art historian Susan Elizabeth Ryan revealed in her monograph on Mr. Indiana that the first version of his most famous work was markedly different. Completed “within complex circumstances” at the end of 1964, after Mr. Indiana and Mr. Kelly had broken up, Ms. Ryan wrote, it had a cruder four-letter word in place of “love,” in a similar composition with a tilted “u.” Mr. Indiana never fully discussed, at least not in public, why he made the transition to the G-rated version, which he used as his Christmas card that year. The next year, he turned it into a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By 1966 he had done enough variations on the theme to have a show of “Love” prints, paintings and sculptures at Stable Gallery in New York. By 1970, when he built a 12-foot-tall steel version for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the image was famous enough to be invoked — some would say stolen — by the book jacket design for Erich Segal’s best-selling novel “Love Story.” (This was long before Mr. Indiana’s dealers started chasing after any copyright infringements.) Mr. Indiana believed the piracy of the image harmed his reputation in the New York art world, and he retreated to Maine in 1978. But many critics countered that he had appropriated his own work shamelessly for decades. He created dozens of versions of “Love” in different mediums, planted “Love” sculptures in cities from Indianapolis to Tokyo, and cast it into different languages, including Hebrew (“Ahava”) and Spanish (“Amor”). He also revamped the slogan for political ends. In 1976, he recast “Love” as “Vote” for a poster commissioned by the Democratic National Committee. In 2008, he built a sculpture for the Democratic National Convention using the word “Hope” and authorized the image’s reproduction on T-shirts, buttons and limited-edition prints sold by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Mr. Anderson, the former Indianapolis and Dallas museum director, said that “Love,” too, should be remembered in a broader political context, as a product of the 1960s. “To be true to the artist’s intentions,” he said, “we
should see ‘Love’ in relation to the antiwar moment, and not as a decal on a baby boomer’s Volvo.” Correction: May 22, 2018 Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misidentified Maxwell Anderson, who in 2008 called Mr. Indiana “an artist of consequence who gets mistaken for a one-hit wonder.” He is the former director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art; he is not currently the director of the Dallas Museum. Graham Bowley contributed reporting. A version of this article appears in print on May 22, 2018, on Page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: Robert Indiana, Whose ‘Love’ Is an Art Icon of the 20th Century, Dies at 89.