Robert Indiana felt the call of art even as a child
Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle on 13 September 1928. In 1933, his parents took him to the world exhibition A Century of Progress in Chicago; the wish to become an artist occupied him already in junior school, consolidated by the engaged support of his teacher Ruth Coffman. The idols of the young Robert Clark – who took the name of his birth state in 1959 – were Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Sheeler, Grant Wood and Charles Demuth. For several years he worked voluntarily in the Air Force and attended art seminars alongside. A scholarship took him to Maine where he met Alex Katz, and at the University of Edinburgh he graduated in botany, English literature and 20th century philosophy. He was interested not only in the visual arts but also the written word from an early age – he wrote poems on a typewriter and adorned them with his illustrations, already indicating Robert Indiana’s very characteristic fusion of word and image.
Pop Art as American myth and cultural pioneer
In 1954, Robert Indiana moved to New York where he worked as assistant in an art shop, enabling contact with many Pop Art artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombly and James Rosenquist. His first Hard Edge pictures were created in the artist’s quarter of Coenties Slip, and in 1963 he met Andy Warhol in the Stable Gallery and participated in his films: for the famous experimental film Kiss, he kissed the sculptress Marisol for three minutes, whilst for the project EAT, he sat hungry in a chair for forty minutes, permitted nothing to eat other than a mushroom. For Indiana, Pop Art was the key to understanding the American soul; Pop was the ‘American Way of Life’, and the upcoming European pop culture only possible from the American model. Out of weathered ship masts and rusty pieces of metal, he built man-sized experimental sculptures called Herms which he understood as a modern interpretation of ancient herms, stelae erected in honour of the god Hermes. With wheels mounted on the girders, the artist suggested rapid movement of the winged messenger of the gods.
World success without copyright; number and counting as basic elements
Robert Indiana created probably his most famous work, LOVE, in 1964 for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Because the card only carried the museum’s copyright and not Indiana’s, under the American copyright law of the time, he was unable to object to the reproduction of his successful motif. LOVE went on to become a much-loved symbol for the world, but hardly anyone knew its creator. The roots of LOVE lie in the Christian Science movement which had a formative function in the artist’s childhood. Not only letters played an important role in Indiana’s work, but numbers and counting led often to emblematic motifs with a high recognition value.
Robert Indiana died on 19 May 2018 in Vinalhaven, Maine.
Robert Indiana - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz: