ROBERT INDIANA
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Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana on September 13, 1928. He adopted his native state as a pseudonymous surname early in his career. During his typically Midwestern boyhood, highway signs had a symbolic importance for him. His father worked for Phillips 66 gas, and when he left his wife and son, he did so down Route 66. And the diner which his mother subsequently operated had the familiar “EAT” sign looming overhead.
Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana on September 13, 1928. He adopted his native state as a pseudonymous surname early in his career. During his typically Midwestern boyhood, highway signs had a symbolic importance for him. His father worked for Phillips 66 gas, and when he left his wife and son, he did so down Route 66. And the diner which his mother subsequently operated had the familiar “EAT” sign looming overhead.
Born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928, he adopted the name of his
Born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928, he adopted the name of his native state as a pseudonymous surname early in his career. During his typically
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A Midwestern boyhood, highway signs had a symbolic importance for him. His father worked for Phillips 66 gas and, when he left his wife and son, he did so down Route #66. And the diner which his mother subsequently operated had the familiar “EAT� sign looming overhead. Indiana studied first at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and then at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New York. From there he went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he received a degree in 1953 and won a traveling fellowship to Europe. In
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1954, he attended Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art. Back in America, Indiana settled in the historic Coentes Slip area on the New York waterfront in 1956 and showed his first hard-edged paintings the following year. From the start he worked with bold, contrasting, sometimes clashing, colors that mirror familiar signs along the highways. A moralist at heart and an admirer of Longfellow, Whitman and Melville, Indiana often wryly prods his viewers. In a billboard4ike triptych dedicated to Melville, for example, he reminds them of Manhattan’s past and suggests they
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walk around the island-city. He also feels a strong kinship with such earlier precisionist painters as Charles Demuth and showed his admiration in The Demuth American Dream No.5 (1963, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto). Although painted in Indiana’s own idiom, it was clearly inspired by Demuth’s well-known I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art).
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