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Home , Love (sculpture), Robert Indiana

• was a major figure in , that most American art form, developing his distinctive “hard-edged” style that he has worked in for over 50 Robert years. One of his images alone, the icon, will Indiana ensure his renown forever. AMERICAN ARTIST • He wasn’t born “Robert Indiana,” but he was born in 1928 - Indiana, and changed his last name from “Clark” when he was in his teens (to make it more interesting). He had a crazy childhood, his family continually on the move. He claimed to have lived in 21 houses before he graduated high school. His parents divorced when he was 10, and he spent many years bouncing between their households. Finally in the last few years of high school, he took the reins and moved to to attend an arts-based high school. He did very well there, but then took three years out of his art study to serve in the US Air Force. • One interesting feature of his early life was that in several different places he lived or was stationed, he started or ran a newspaper. Writing and words were always very important to him.

• After his military service, he attended several different art schools, including the famous , and also spent some time in Europe. • He ultimately moved to because that was the center of the American art world in the mid-1950s. Things were rough for a while, as he worked in an art supply store to make ends meet, but he made friends with the abstract Robert Indiana‘s studio at the New York City piers (with cat!) and some of his early , called herms. artist , who invited him to live with other artists in some abandoned warehouses on the East River. • It was here that Indiana created his first major pieces, sculptures made from industrial materials and old planks he found in the lofts. He called these “herms,” after the pillars that held road signs in ancient Greece. He also found some brass stencils that he incorporated into his pieces, establishing the importance of numbers, words and typography to his work.

• Robert Indiana’s works can look very simple and yet hard to understand, but he was always ready to help. He said once, “Most of my work is very autobiographical in one way or another.” Through various writings and interviews, he was happy to explain why he used the words and symbols he did. Sometimes he used just strong three-letter words to send a message, while other times he created pieces that

The Calumet, 1961 HUG, 1962 were more complex. • For instance, the word calumet, the title of one painting, has several meanings. It’s a small town in Indiana, and it’s also a word for a Native American ceremonial pipe. He said that this painting is “about heroes,” or those Indian tribes that once had dignity and met like modern nations do. The words on the outer circle are from the famous poem The Song of Hiawatha. Around the stars are names of Indian tribes that gathered to meet. Indiana felt this painting depicted a “great tragedy,” the Native Americans’ loss of their culture. • The painting HUG looks very simple, but maybe it’s not quite. It’s a warm and fuzzy word depicted in stark, black, mechanical stencils. Also, maybe there’s a little sadness that the word doesn’t fill the whole canvas, but instead hovers above what he called a “vacant rectangle,” where there is no hug to be found.

• Robert Indiana had some luck in his timing and in his artist friends. When he arrived, many people were tiring of the pure abstraction of artists like Jackson Pollock. Indiana and his Pop Art friends were young people making fresh art, in a world that’s always looking for something new. The Pop artists embraced modern American life, using what they saw around them – from the movies, advertising, highway signs, comic books, and everyday objects. They most often used American Dream I, 1961 The Eateria, 1962 bright colors and strong, hard-edged images. For Robert Indiana, Pop art was by definition “American.” • After only a few years of perfecting his style, one of this works, The American Dream I, was purchased for the Museum of in New York. This painting has it all to be classic Robert Indiana -- stars, circles, stenciled short words, bright colors, numbers -- and most of them have personal significance to him. The numbers top left are highways he often traveled. “TILT” comes from the pinball games he found in the many roadside cafes he visited with is parents. “TAKE ALL” is a reference to an American’s push to be a winner. And the khaki green, plus the stars, probably have some reference to his Air Force days. • Along with HUG and DIE, the word EAT is one that comes up again and again. It refers to the diners his mother worked in, which often had a big neon “EAT” sign over them. Plus you have to eat to live! And you have those numbers again, this time arrayed like on a gaming table. Spin the wheel!

Charles Demuth‘s I Saw the Figure 5 • This work has an interesting history, based on an earlier in Gold, 1928 ▶ painting Indiana admired that was created in 1928, the year of his birth, which he found significant. That year, the artist Charles Demuth was inspired by a poem that his friend William Carlos Williams had written on the spur of the moment, when a fire engine “Number 5” went clanging past in the New York streets: Among the rain / and lights / I saw

◀ Robert Indiana‘s The Figure 5, 1963 the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / fire truck / moving / tense / unheeded / to gong clangs / siren howls / and wheels rumbling / through the dark city. • Robert Indiana loved this story and this painting from 35 years earlier, in some ways similar to his own. He kept the series of number 5’s but changed the background to suit his style, using his favorite three-letter words to complete it. • As with many of his works, Indiana painted several variations of The Figure 5. Very soon he was to turn to screenprinting in order to more easily make “multiples” of his art. He was good friends with , who is famous for his screenprints. Unlike Warhol, who purposefully made his prints off-kilter and obviously handmade, Indiana wanted his prints to look as “machine- made” as possible.

• Not all artists have a political side, but Robert Indiana did. He heard the news coming out of segregated Southern states, where black people were not respected or given their rights, and was horrified. He decided to express his outrage in a series of paintings. He originally intended to depict all the states that had left the Union in the Civil War but he ended up just doing four.

Alabama, 1965 Mississippi, 1965 • On each is written, “Just as in the anatomy of man, every nation must have its hind part” (his words). The stars are the “stain of the Confederate flag.” The cities named were places where very bad things had happened to African Americans who were trying to make things better. He felt that his hard-edged style was a good way to depict people uninterested in change. • Around this time, he moved from the waterfront lofts to more comfortable space in a better neighborhood of Manhattan. He also began spending a lot of time in Vinalhaven, , a tiny island town where one of his friends lived. He rented an old building named the “Star of Hope.” Given how much he had used stars in his art, he thought this was fate for sure! (He has lived there full-time since 1978.)

• Here is the famous LOVE icon. This design, with the tilted “O,” wasn’t more special than his others until MoMA asked him to submit a design for their 1965 Christmas card. He gave it to them in many different color combinations, like those on the bottom right, and they chose the red, blue and green, probably because it the was most Christmassy and was very bright. The design became an instant classic, at least partly because the late 1960s was a time when many people were hoping to bring more love and less war into the world. All of a sudden, Robert Indiana became a household name. • In later years, he revealed more details about why the image is so personal to him. The red, blue and green was his favorite colorway, he said, because it reminded him of his father who died that year. All during Robert’s childhood, his father worked for the Phillips 66 oil company, whose gas stations had a green and red circular sign with a big 66 on it. Robert Indiana said he was reminded of looking up at the Phillips sign with a background of Indiana blue sky. • The LOVE stamp was issued in 1973, the first of their now regular series of “love” stamps that appear each February.

• As we’ve said, Indiana made many series of paintings, sometimes variations on a design, sometimes on a theme. One ambitious project was to make a personal print for each year of the 1960s (and he went on to do the 1970s, too). On the left is his 1961. He said in an interview, “This painting celebrates the year 1961. I had my studio in South Ferry. . . . I like the word Chicago and I spent four years there and so

Decade: Autoportrait 1961 Decade: Autoportrait 1966 loosely speaking this gave me an excuse to use the word Chicago.” He goes on to the word Bar, the most significant. Alfred Barr (one “r” is under the “1”) was the head of the MoMA in 1961 and bought a painting of Indiana’s to hang in the museum. That purchase made his reputation and changed his life. • You might have noticed that the colors of 1966 on the right are the same as the LOVE image, which is of course on purpose! 1966 was the year that LOVE became famous, and Indiana’s life was changed even more. Six was his favorite number. The word refers to the New York neighborhood where the gallery that sold his paintings was. Along with painting and screenprints, Indiana also translated his work into monumental . This has often been acquired to use as public art. Top left is the original Cor-Ten steel LOVE statue. One of Indiana’s strongest-held beliefs was that a word was an appropriate subject for an artwork, and what better way to show this than to make it massive! Under that is LOVE on the streets of New York. On the right is the sculpture that sits in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo.

"Numbers One through Zero • Indiana created this 12-foot high Cor-Ten steel version of AHAVA, the Hebrew word for love, as a gift for the in . It’s dramatically displayed in the museum’s sculpture garden, the brown rust of the steel

!AHAVA (Love) in Jerusalem against the blue sky creating a contrast between the earthly

"AMOR in the National Gallery‘s sculpture garden and heavenly, symbolizing two different aspects of love. • The Spanish word for love, AMOR, you can see any time at the National Gallery Sculpture Garden on the Mall in DC.

• NUMBERS ONE through ZERO is a monumental example of Indiana’s fascination with the power of numbers. He once said that his interest in numbers is related to how many times he moved as a child, always having to memorize a new address and ride on numbered highways to get there. Each number has a particular significance, too, moving from 1 which represents birth, through life to 0, which stands for death. The colors had meaning for him, too, with the bright reds and blues of the early decades giving way to blacks and grays in the last ones. • These numbers have been exhibited in many museums and on the streets of different cities, for instance recently in the financial district of London.

Some LOVE products … Because Robert Indiana didn’t enforce his copyright on the LOVE design in the 1960s – it certainly wouldn’t have been his style to write nasty letters telling people to stop using his work – it’s pretty much fair game now and can be found on an incredible range of products. People have also used the stacked-letter design for other purposes, such as this for the year 2000.

• Robert Indiana was very taken with ’s memoir, The Audacity of Hope, and decided to turn LOVE into HOPE. He designed a 6-foot-tall aluminum sculpture to be displayed outside the 2008 Democratic National Convention, with proceeds from t-shirts and other items emblazoned with the logo benefitting Obama’s campaign.

◀ Robert Indiana with HOPE, designed for the Democratic National Convention in 2008. Indiana had contributed to the political process earlier in his

▲ His earlier VOTE, designed to encourage voting in 1976. life, when in 1978 he created a VOTE poster to encourage people to register. • He still lives in the Star of Hope building in Maine, which he continued to restore over the years. • One of his most famous quotations explained his art this way: “I am an American painter of signs charting the course. I wish to be a people’s painter as well as a painter’s painter.” Even though his art was very personal to him, he also wanted it to brighten the lives of all who experienced it.