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Robert,
Indiana
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LOVE is all you need…Robert Indiana, on this Moment of Indiana History.
A time capsule sealed in the early twentieth century might contain a
number of items with Indiana origins—a car, a Coke bottle, a Raggedy
Ann doll. American culture in the second half of the century, however,
might be represented by a different icon that can also be traced back
to the Hoosier State. Originally created as a Christmas card design for
the Museum of Modern Art in 1964, the image entitled LOVE has been burned
into the collective visual consciousness in the intervening years. Four
red block letters L-O-V-E are arranged in a square against a blue and
green ground; the “O” is tilted at a 45 degree angle. In 1973,
the image enjoyed wide circulation as a postage stamp, and later, a number
of large sculptural incarnations. Owing to a lack of copyright, LOVE has
since been reproduced willy-nilly.
Though the ubiquitous logo is in public domain, it owes its existence
to a single artist. Robert Indiana is most often associated with the New
York Pop art movement of the 50’s and 60’s, but was born Robert
Clark in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928. The artist moved around the periphery
of Indianapolis during his Depression-era childhood. The family settled
for a time in Mooresville where, at the age of six, Indiana attended the
funeral of the town’s most notorious native son, John Dillinger.
The artist remembered a boyhood spent riding in the family car looking
at billboards and eating chicken dinners with country relatives. One memorable
beacon of his youth was an illuminated sign hovering over downtown Indianapolis
advertising Phillips 66, his father’s sometime employer. Though
his most famous works borrow the bold colors and design of commercial
art, earlier pieces partook of a more traditional idiom. A watercolor
he painted at age 17, for example, is catalogued as “My Cousin's
General Store in Bean Blossom, Indiana”’; a plein-air study
of an old grain elevator in Mooresville was his first sale. While working
after school as a Western Union bicycle messenger and a copy boy for the
Indianapolis Star, Indiana concentrated on art classes in high school
at Arsenal Tech in Indianapolis. Upon graduation, he received a Latin
award, a composition prize named for Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley,
and a scholarship to the Herron School of Art, which he turned down. Enlisting
instead—in order to get out of Indiana, he later recalled—he
spent three years in the Air Force, then attended the Art Institute of
Chicago on the GI Bill.
The artist came to New York in 1954, at which point he changed his surname
to “Indiana,” to distinguish himself from a peer named Clark.
“I chose it because it was my birthplace,” the artist recalled.
“It's home and it's the place of most all of my most pleasant memories.”
Indiana disavowed an overly sentimental attachment to the state or its
folk, however. By the early 60’s, the artist claimed to “have
divorced myself from Hoosiers pretty completely. People from Indiana,
generally speaking, are like my own family,” he stated, “most
of them are rather simple people with uncomplicated lives and I outgrew
that a long, long time ago.” Nonetheless, in 1978 Robert Indiana
quit New York for the remote fishing town of Vinalhaven, Maine, where
he remains.
Incidentally, Robert Indiana is not the only artist to have adopted the name of the Hoosier state as a surname. Writer, artist and critic Gary Indiana, who frequently visits the topics of criminality and the depravity of contemporary culture, was born Gary Hoisington in New Hampshire in 1950.
This Moment of Indiana History is a production of the Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations in association with the Indiana Historical Society. More information is available on-line at “moment of Indiana history.org.”
Writer: Yaël Ksander
This Moment of Indiana History is a production of the Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations in association with the Indiana Historical Society. More information is available at “Moment of Indiana history dot org."
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