Robert Indiana’S First Sign Paintings

ROBERT INDIA NA SIGN PAINTINGS 1960-65

CRAIG F. STARR GALLERY ROBERT INDIANA’S FIRST SIGN PAINTINGS

by John Wilmerding

Robert Indiana’s suite of early canvases, only about a foot square, most painted between 1960 and 1962 , make a beautiful and striking series when brought together. They are also particularly important as his first works in the signature Pop style that would character - ize his career. Nonetheless, they are among Indiana’s least documented and least seen paintings. We can identify over two dozen images of this intimate scale, yet only a couple have been exhibited or reproduced. Despite the notable attention Indiana has received over the last several years, including the publication of the first comprehensive biography, by Susan Elizabeth Ryan, in 2000 and a sweeping retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the fall of 2013 , this formative moment remains relatively unexam - ined. Yet these works are crucial in understanding the transition Indiana made from abstract compositions to images that include words and numbers, and they set the stage for the important larger canvases that would soon follow in the mid-sixties. Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928 . His fam - ily moved frequently during his childhood. Early on, he showed talent for drawing, and after spending time in the army, enrolled in the school of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 . In 1954 he moved to New York. Two years later he found studio space in one of the old warehouses on Coenties Slip on the Lower Manhattan waterfront. These various expe - riences would be factors in the subjects and practice of his art. In 1958 the artist changed his name to Robert Indiana, taking the name of his native state and declaring that he would be an “American painter of signs .” Earlier that year he produced Stavrosis , a large, abstract, and emblematic work whose title means “Crucifixion .” Stavrosis contains suggestive vegetable or plantlike forms, which soon led to paintings of grasses, gingko leaves, and avocado seeds. This imagery was indebted to other young artists working in the neighborhood, like Jack Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly, who were also depicting abstracted shapes from nature. Kelly and Indiana met in 1956 and would share quarters at Coenties Slip for the next decade. Kelly was a close friend and a strong artistic influence on Indiana, with his emphasis on areas of flat color and hard-edged definition of forms. Youngerman, Kelly, and Indiana belonged to a new Untitled , 1957 . Photograph by Hans Namuth. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate. Artists on the roof of 3-5 Coenties Slip (left to right: Delphine Seyrig, Duncan Youngerman, generation of artists who came to New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism and Robert Clark, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Agnes Martin ). Jack Youngerman, Yayo, ca. 1958. Oil on canvas, 33 x 43 inches. © Jack Youngerman.

its self-referential gesturalism, and they all sought to break new ground and take their work in a different direction. Minimalist reduction was one direction, and in the next few years, the imagery of popular culture and commercial signage provided others. It is important to view these early paintings in the context of other work Indiana was undertaking around 1960, in particular his graphite rubbings from old brass stencils and his first assemblages in wood, including the totemic posts he called “herms.” These related groups are also relatively understudied, the herms being the best known but the stencil drawings remaining almost as unfamiliar as the small canvases. Among the found objects and materials Indiana retrieved from his Coenties Slip loft and other nearby buildings were brass stencils of company names, often circular in form, which were used for lettering on boxes and crates that contained goods to be shipped or marketed. Work made from only one of these stencils, “The American Hay Company,” has been occasionally reproduced, though other stencils have been noted as inspiration for early canvases, namely “The American Stock Company,” “The American Reaping Company,” and “The American Gas Works.” There are several formal elements shared across this varied production: the stenciled painting of letters, phrases, and numbers; a generally intimate scale; and a repeated use of the circle, a geometric form that

1 Robert Indiana, Ginkgo, 1959. Gesso on wood panel, 15 ⁄2 x 9 inches. Private collection. would become central to much of Indiana’s work. The artist has said of the American Hay Company image: “It was that one stencil in particular which has more or less cast the die of my whole work … From that one stencil I derived my circular motif.” Typical of Indiana’s work at this moment is Ra , 1960 (fig . 2 ), with its four blue circles set on a ground of red and green that evokes an abstracted fan or tree shape. The title alludes to the Egyptian sun god, reflecting the artist’s fascination with ancient figures and themes. It is one in a triptych of nearly square canvases set side by side (the others showing one and two circles respectively), suggesting the format of an altarpiece. The artist titled a similar Robert Indiana, The American Hay Company , 1962 . 1 canvas from the same year with a single Conté crayon frottage on paper, 25 ⁄8 x 19 inches. The Museum of Modern Art. Eugene and Clare Thaw Fund. circle Coenties Slip (fig . 1 ), signaling an Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / allusion to a pier extending into the Art Resource, NY water. There is also a larger canvas of 1959–60 , titled The Slips , with eight circles, each explicitly named for a slip along the nearby waterfront. The clean geometry of these early works is due in large part to the influence of Kelly, who had recently returned from several years in Paris, where he developed a simpli - fied style of outlined forms abstracted from botanical and architectural fragments. Kelly’s example quickly persuaded Indiana to modify his early painterly execution and begin Indiana’s Coenties Slip studio, ca. 1960 , with herms, including Star (1960-62 ) using the flat colors, reductive shapes, and neutral surfaces favored by his friend. But in an early stage without wheels and GE (1960 ) in an early state without a peg. Photograph by John Ardoin. Indiana would go further than Kelly and embrace the pure geometric configurations of the circle and square. These shapes first showed up in an earlier series of paintings that Indiana called “orbs,” with motifs of gold circles on plywood. Other paintings were once worked, as well as to Route 66 , the mythic cross-country highway from the Midwest devoted to nearly symmetrical vegetable shapes, like the avocado pit, completed in Kelly- to California, celebrated by Jack Kerouac in writing and Bob Dylan in song. Juxtaposed like color schemes of blue and green. with FUN or EAT, USA and 66 evoked the new open American highway of fast cars, fast Within a year, however, by 1961 Indiana began including three- and four-letter food, and fast sex. words in his designs, which balanced the block lettering of the text with repeated abstract Indiana’s verbal gamesmanship grows out of his life-long interest in literature shapes. Typical are FUN , 1961 (fig . 4 ), with its paired circles, and Four Star Love , 1961 (fol - and poetry. He has written free verse since his early years, often matched with word lowing page ), with its matched quartet of letters below and stars above. Indiana’s insistence paintings. From this series of the early sixties forward, he has regularly incorporated on including the verbal in tandem with the visual soon led to an artistic and personal part - phrases into his motifs, or made letters fill the entire picture plane. In this light, his shift ing of ways with Kelly, although they would both pursue separate if parallel stylistic tracks from the total abstraction of Kelly to his own brand of visual narrative is perhaps the through subsequent careers. most significant characteristic of this series of paintings. That they are relatively small was By 1962 Indiana had begun to incorporate numbers as well as phrases in his arrange - in part due to the expense of buying canvas in any quantity, but fortuitously, their simple ments. Their seriality and stenciled execution owe a debt to the alphabet and number painted words and their dimensions evoke handsomely paintings of Jasper Johns, another neighbor working in the vicinity. Now Indiana became illustrated books. These small, breakthrough paintings more playful in pairings and sequences of pictures, as in UP (fig . 7, 8 ) and DOWN (fig . 6 ), also served as maquettes for the larger and more ambi - both from 1962 , which contain numerals arranged in a circle and an arc, respectively, to tious compositions the artist would soon undertake. refer to time-keeping instruments of a similar size like clocks or gas meters. With this energetic early series of works, Indiana He experimented with varying color combinations in the same motif, as in the found both his vision and voice. Most importantly, these sequence in which “EAT” is in an upper field of color above the silhouette of a fork in a paintings led directly to the finest decade of his early lower field (fig . 9 ). The small scale of these pictures was, appropriately, close to that of a maturity and his distinctive place in the rising Pop tablemat or place setting. He also enjoyed the linguistic play of pairing “FO R” with the movement. After two years, the series was close to run - fork, in a rhyme of adverb and noun (fig . 10 ). Later he would go a step further to inter - ning its course, and the artist began to explore other change the verbal and the numerical, matching “TO” and “ 2,” “FO R” and “ 4,” and “EAT” paths. The first was to try a larger format, which he did in its past tense “ATE” and “ 8.” Similarly, EYE , 1962 (fig . 5 ), was both about seeing as well with New Glory Penny , 1963 (fig . 14 ), which came about as the first person “I.” thanks to the magazine Art in America , which invited a Some in the group directly play with word and image, for example, GRASS , 1962 number of American artists to submit designs for a new (fig . 11 ), where the title sits beneath a panel of green, or DIE , also from 1962 , which par - currency. Indiana proposed a ten-sided coin, arguing tially refers to the death of the artist’s mother, but also in its square and diamond formats, that it would be readily recognizable in a pocketful of suggests the singular of “dice .” LIP , 1961 (fig . 3 ) set between two overlapping red circles, change. Never adopted, the idea stimulated him to paint suggests an open mouth. Other three- or four-letter-word paintings from the early 1960 s a pair of canvases in 1963 , each two feet square, retaining like HUG (fig . 12 ), JOY , SILO , and WIND , exhibit their own visual and aural resonances. something of the earlier small-scale work but moving Robert Indiana, New Glory Penny Variants on USA also begin at this time and continue into 1964 and beyond. Linked to the towards the even larger canvases that he would produce originally published in “Coins by Sculptors ,” Art in America , April 1963 . USA paintings are the 66 works, which allude to the gas station where the artist’s father in mid-decade. Courtesy BMP Media Holdings, LLC. This early group of paintings also provided the artistic vocabulary for many of the familiar themes of Indiana’s greatest Pop works. For example, Ra led to Thoth , 1988 , which referenced another Egyptian god. EAT and DIE would be linked in several large pendant canvases, and USA/66 would recur in various large-scale paintings in subsequent years. Perhaps most famously, the 1961 Four Star Love gave Indiana the idea for what would become the most recognizable design of his career. He decided to replace the four stars with the word “LOVE” in a block configuration, made visually memorable by the tilt of the letter O in the upper right corner. It was the work he made at the outset of sixties, which uniquely framed poetic sentiment in the visual language of commercial typography, that would define the direc - tion of Robert Indiana’s career. It brought language into the Pop movement and beyond, with an influence extending all the way to conceptual artists in later decades. These small canvases remain visually strong, original, and prophetic.

John Wilmerding is Sarofim Professor of American Art, emeritus, at Princeton University. He is the co-author of a book and two exhibition catalogues on Robert Indiana.

Selected Bibliography Crow, Thomas E. The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995 . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014 , pp. 137–62 . Haskell, Barbara, René Paul Barilleaux, and Sasha Nicholas. Robert Indiana: Beyond Love . Exhibition cat - alogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2013 . Pissarro, Joachim and Hélène Depotte. Robert Indiana: Retrospective, 1958-1998 . Exhibition catalogue, Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, 1998 . Ryan, Susan Elizabeth. Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000 . Unruh, Allison, Thomas Crow, Jonathan D. Katz, and Kalliopi Minioudaki. Robert Indiana: New Perspectives . Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012 . Weinhardt, Carl J., Jr. Robert Indiana . New York: Abrams, 1990 . 1 Robert Indiana, Four Star Love , 1961 , oil on canvas, 12 x 11 ⁄8 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Maine, Gift of Todd Brassner in memory of Doug Rosen. Wilmerding, John, Joachim Pissarro, and Robert Pincus-Witten. Robert Indiana: The Artist and His Work 1955–2005 . New York: Rizzoli, 2006 . PLATES 1. Coenties Slip, 1960 2. Ra , 1960 3. LIP , 1960 4. FUN , 1961 5. EYE , 1962 6. DOWN , 1962 7. UP , 1962 8. UP , 1962 9. EA T, 1962 10. FOR , 1962 11. GRASS , 1962 12. HUG , 1962 13. Route 66 , 1962 14. New Glory Penny , 1963 15. USA/FUN , 1964 16. USA/EAT , 1965 17. LOVE , 1965 CHECKLIST

1. Coenties Slip , 1960 10. FOR , 1962 Oil on canvas, 10 x 8 inches Oil on canvas, 12 x 11 inches Private collection Greenwich Fine Arts

2. Ra , 1960 11. GRASS , 1962 Oil on canvas, 12 x 11 inches, each Oil on canvas, 10 x 8 inches Collection of the artist Greenwich Fine Arts 3. LIP , 1960 12. , 1962 Oil on canvas, 12 x 11 inches HUG Collection of the artist Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches Collection of Lisa Bialkin 4. FUN , 1961 1 Oil on canvas, 10 ⁄16 x 8 inches 13. Route 66 , 1962

1 1 Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Oil on canvas, 12 ⁄4 x 11 ⁄2 inches Gift from the Gene Swenson Collection, 1970.0126 Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Museum purchase 5. EYE , 1962 3 1 with funds from the Benefactors Fund, 1987 Gesso and oil on wood, 7 ⁄8 x 5 ⁄4 inches Collection of Bill Katz 14. New Glory Penny , 1963 6. DOWN , 1962 Oil on canvas, two panels, 24 x 24 inches Oil on canvas, 12 x 11 inches Private collection Private collection 15. USA/FUN , 1964 7. UP , 1962 Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches Oil on canvas, 12 x 11 inches Greenwich Fine Arts Collection of Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman 16. USA/EAT , 1965 8. UP , 1962 Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches Oil on canvas, 12 x 11 inches Private collection Private collection

9. EAT , 1962 17. LOVE , 1965 Oil on canvas, 12 x 11 inches Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches Private collection Private collection

opposite: Indiana (right) with studio assistant Bill Katz in Indiana’s studio on Spring Street, New York, 1966 . Photograph by Basil Langton. This publication accompanies the exhibition: Robert Indiana: Sign Paintings 1960-65 September 10 – October 31, 2015

Photography: Light Blue Studio; except: Ginkgo , figure 14 courtesy the artist; Four Star Love courtesy Portland Museum of Art, Maine; figure 5 Michael Scalisi; figure 12 Diana Berrent Photography; figure 13 courtesy Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Design: Step Graphics Printing: Meri dian Printing

Craig F. Starr Gallery would like to thank the lenders for their participation in this exhibition. We also wish to express our gratitude to Robert Indiana, John Wilmerding, the Morgan Art Foundation, the Paul Kasmin Gallery, Bill Katz, Emeline Salama-Caro, Marc Salama-Caro, and Simon Salama-Caro for their support and guidance in making this show possible.

ISBN: 978-0-9863766-0-3

CRAIG F. STARR GALLERY 5 East 73rd Street New York, NY 10021 Tel 212 570 1739 Fax 212 570 6848 Hours: Monday -Saturday 11- 5:30 www.craigstar r.com