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Robert Indiana Robert Indiana Arts in Education Robert Indiana first came to Maine in 1969 at the invitation of renowned Life magazine photographer Eliot Elisofon, who had a summer home on the island of Vinalhaven, some twelve miles from Rockland. On that first visit, Indiana saw an old Odd Fellows lodge called the Star of Hope. Built in 1874 by the island’s members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the worn, distinctive, three-story Victorian building on the town’s main street appealed to Indiana, who has described himself as a “hopeless romantic.” Though long abandoned, it was still largely intact, with all its original furnishings and decorations found in Odd Fellows lodges throughout the United States that were essential for their ceremonies. Elisofon saw how much Indiana admired the building and soon bought it, then rented it to Indiana in the summertime. After Elisofon’s death in 1973, Indiana bought it from the photographer’s estate in 1977 and moved in the next year. He spent the rest of his life there, restoring the building, which, in 1981, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928, he knew at age six that he wanted to be an artist. Encouraged Robert Indiana, LOVE, 1996, 99.8 by his teachers, he soon proved himself adept at drawing and watercolor. His earliest formal training was at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, and after serving in the US Army Air Corps following World War II, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on the GI Bill. He moved to New York in 1954, and in 1958 he changed his name to Robert Indiana, adopting the name of his native state as he sought to establish his artistic identity. He found success in the early 1960s, with one of his paintings acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. By then, Indiana had added a critical new element into his work: words. Inspired by the chance discovery of a set of stencils for letters in his Coenties Slip studio in Lower Manhattan, he began to experiment with simple, carefully ordered combinations of words, geometric shapes, and bold colors. He was seen as one of several young artists considered the creators of the Pop Art movement, who shared an interest in imagery drawn from American popular culture. His insertion of words into his work, however, and his keen sensitivity to how images and words interact visually, intellectually, and emotionally, separate his work from that of the other Pop artists. Acknowledging the graphic design element in his work, Indiana said, “I am America’s great sign painter,” somewhat understating the carefully conceived and sophisticated foundation of his art. In Indiana’s case, too, however much his imagery may have responded to contemporary American culture, his work is also largely autobiographical. “I am painting and writing my own history,” he said. Indiana is best known for his many paintings, prints, and sculptures of LOVE. Its origins can be traced to personal as well as artistic sources. Raised as a Christian Scientist, he took note of the single inscription found in its churches: “God is Love.” In 1961, he inserted the word in a painting, 4-Star Love, running it across the bottom of the canvas, and in 1964, he painted Love is God, rephrasing the words he had encountered years earlier in church. Later that year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned Indiana to do a Christmas card, and in 1965 he produced a red, green, and blue design with Farnsworth Arts in Education | Developed by Andrea L. Curtis, Education Program Manager | 2020 www.farnsworthmuseum.org | www.farnsworthartsineducation.org Robert Indiana Arts in Education the word “love” that established the model for what became one of the most iconic images in American art. LOVE is deceptively simple yet compositionally and philosophically sophisticated. The four letters are stacked in two layers, forcing the viewer to read it across the top and then across the bottom. We seem to do so effortlessly, despite its variation from the norm. His other critical variation was tilting the O on a forty-five-degree angle, energizing both the word and the composition. The contrasts of solids and voids, and the play between the colors Indiana chose, became a dynamic component of his many two-and three-dimensional variations on the image. But it is the meaning of the word itself that gives the image its enduring impact. As the signifier of the deep affection between friends, family, and lovers, the word expresses one of humankind’s most fundamental emotions. Of course, Indiana’s image was born in the 1960s with all the connotations emblematic of the period – love beads, love child, love-ins, free love, even an entire love generation. Yet however much the image speaks of a specific moment in American culture, for Indiana it evolved from a personal set of experiences, reaching back to his childhood. As is so often the case with Indiana’s imagery, his LOVE is simultaneously profoundly personal and profoundly universal. While Indiana continued to make paintings, prints, and sculptures that evolved from his early artistic successes, Maine served as an unexpected inspiration. He accidentally learned that famed American modernist Marsden Hartley, a Maine native, had spent the summer of 1938 on Vinalhaven in a building across the street from the Star of Hope. Admittedly working “very much by the magic of coincidence,” Indiana began to study Hartley’s work, centering on a series of paintings Hartley did in 1914-15 in memory of his fallen friend and presumed lover, Karl von Freyburg, killed shortly after joining the German army during World War I. Inspired by these works, Indiana embarked on his own commemorative series of eighteen paintings and then ten silkscreen prints made between 1989 and 1994. They are simultaneously an homage to one of the foremost American modernist painters and a visual poem on the two artists’ shared interests in radical formal vocabularies, including their innovative combinations of letters and numbers in their imagery, as well as their lives as homosexual artists and their experience of living and working in Maine. Top to Bottom: Robert Indiana, Decade Indiana’s adopted state continued to inspire his work. In 2002, the state Autoportrait 1969, 1982, 82.16.1; Robert commissioned him to do a painting for the Maine State House. Emblematic of Indiana, The Hartley Elegy Series: The Berlin his affection for his Vinalhaven home, he painted The Islands. In a state where Series, KvF I, 1990, 2010.7.1 the size of its vast interior far exceeds that of its otherwise numerous islands, however, Indiana’s painting was turned down. He then painted First State to Hail the Sun, a recognition that each day the sun’s first appearance in the nation is over its easternmost state, the place Indiana made his home. Farnsworth Arts in Education | Developed by Andrea L. Curtis, Education Program Manager | 2020 www.farnsworthmuseum.org | www.farnsworthartsineducation.org Robert Indiana Arts in Education Contributor(s): Claire Horne, Education Project Assistant Resource(s): “Robert Indiana.” The Farnsworth Art Museum, Maine and American Art, RizzoliElectra, New York, NY, 2020, p. 299-307. Farnsworth Arts in Education | Developed by Andrea L. Curtis, Education Program Manager | 2020 www.farnsworthmuseum.org | www.farnsworthartsineducation.org.
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