Robert Indiana
Artist whose famous ‘LOVE’ design brought him few rewards
ROBERT INDIANA, who has died aged 89, found fame with his sculptures, paintings and screen-prints that depicted the word “LOVE”.
The artist originally designed his motif, with the four capitalised letters rendered in red, blue and green, stacked as a square, the O falling at an angle, as a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965. The work, intended as critique of the Vietnam War, took on a life of its own, however, and was replicated on posters, T-shirts, mostly without the permission of the artist.
Indiana had not copyrighted his design: “Everybody presumed I was getting terribly wealthy because LOVE was popping up all over the world,” he recalled. “That happened very quickly. And painfully.”
Nevertheless, Indiana revisited the design himself on numerous occasions. LOVE sculptures have been installed as permanent and temporary public art works around the world. In 2014 he exhibited one such sculpture at the site of the Bishopsgate bomb in London, and in 2006 another version was shown in the gardens of Chatsworth House.
He was born Robert Clark on 13 October 1928 in New Castle, Indiana, later adopting his home state as his surname. A baby of the Depression, he was adopted soon after birth by Earl Clark, an oil company executive, and his wife Carmen Watters. The Clarks fell on hard times after Earl was made redundant and in 1938 the couple separated. The boy lived between his parents.
In his final two years at Arsenal Technical High School, Indianapolis, encouraged by his art teacher, Robert would go each Saturday to sketch sessions at the John Herron Art Institute, the fees waived in recognition of his natural talent. In 1946 the art school offered him the chance to continue his studies full-time, but instead Indiana enlisted with the US Army Air Corps.
In 1949, having served for three years at bases across the States, he applied to the Art Institute of Chicago under the GI Bill to study painting and graphics. On graduation in 1953, having attended a summer course at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Indiana crossed the Atlantic and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study Fine Art. Returning to New York, he swapped his early expressionist and figurative approach for Pop Art, often incorporating words, phrases and symbols in his paintings and sculptures.
In 1956 Indiana, who was working in an art supply store on 57th Street, met Ellsworth Kelly, a pioneer of the so-called Hard Edge painting school, who had come in to buy a postcard. Hitting it off, the two embarked on an on-off romance and Kelly encouraged Indiana to move to Coenties Slip, a decaying port area in Manhattan where a group of artists had taken studios.
Success followed quickly. In 1961 MOMA bought The American Dream – a murky brown canvas overlaid with four target-like circles, one decorated with the numbers of significant American highways, another simply stating “Take All” – one of many works by the artist claiming to explore America’s culture and fractured politics. Other works included a series of sign-like paintings bleakly incorporating the words “EAT” and “DIE”.
But the exploitation of the LOVE design was, as the art historian Robert Storr put it, a “disaster” for Indiana, leading him to be pegged as a commercial artist.
In 1978 Indiana moved to the island of Vinalhaven, Maine, claiming he had been “blackballed” by the art world. It was not until a 2013 retrospective at the Whitney in New York that his work began to be reassessed. The exhibition was called “Beyond Love”.
Robert Indiana, born October 13 1928, died May 19 2018