Self proclaimed “American painter of signs”, Robert Indiana played a central role in the development of assemblage art, hard-edge painting and Pop art since the 1960s.
Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana on September 13, 1928. Adopted as an infant, he spent his childhood moving frequently throughout his namesake state. After serving for three years in the United States Army Air Forces, Indiana studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (1949–1953), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (1953) and Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art (1953–1954). Upon his return to the U.S., he settled in New York City and took a residence in Coenties Slip where he he met artists such as James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman through Ellsworth Kelly.
Working with scavenged material found in abandoned warehouses, Indiana soon became one of the most creative artists of the New York City scene of the early 1960s. He was featured in influential New York shows at the Martha Jackson Gallery, the Sidney Janis Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art (which acquired The American Dream in 1961, the first in a series of paintings exploring the illusory American Dream).
The ideas and motifs which appeared in early Indiana’s work have recurred throughout his career. LOVE and Numbers, among the best known of his subjects, reflects the artist’s involvement with the formal concern of 1960’s abstraction (use of pure colors, optical effects, serialization). In his work, he also demonstrated a penchant for the visual power of both languages and numbers.
Indiana’s best known image is the word Love in upper-case letters, arranged in a square with a tilted letter “O”. This motif was converted into several works (paintings and prints), experimenting each time with different color schemes and compositional formats. In 1965, LOVE was selected by the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 for their Christmas card. In 1973, the U.S. Postal Service commissioned Indiana to design a postage stamp based on this motif. LOVE quickly permeated wider popular culture, and was adopted as an emblem of the “Love Generation.”
