Robert Indiana’s Best: A Mini Retrospective

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/arts/design/barbara-haskell-robert-indiana.html

Version 0 of 1.

From Herman Melville to Mae West, pinball machines to a slave ship, Robert Indiana drew inspiration for his art from American sources that had deeply personal meanings. Perhaps no one has a better understanding of those associations than Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art who organized the retrospective of Mr. Indiana’s work, “Beyond Love,” in 2013-14, that rediscovered his career. These are her appraisals of some of her favorite works by the artist.

[Robert Indiana obituary | A sense of isolation near the end | Another view of his work | The origins of “LOVE”]

Mr. Indiana linked this painting with the performance of Mae West, his favorite movie star from childhood, as Tira the lion tamer in “I’m No Angel” (1933). But the words “law,” “cat,” “men,” and “sex” in the piece alluded equally to the perils of homosexuality in an age when sodomy was illegal, and served as a coded reference to the gay community, of which Mr. Indiana was a part.

More than any other artist of his generation, Mr. Indiana identified himself as an American. To this end, he worked in what he felt was a quintessentially American style — hard-edge and polychromatic — and allied himself with American writers and painters from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1961-62, he declared his bond with his literary past by stenciling sentences onto his paintings from canonical novels and poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. This painting, his first literary work, drew from the opening chapter of Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), in which warriors from Native American tribes are called together and urged to forgo war in favor of peace.

This work is the first in a series of paintings in which Mr. Indiana addressed the ambiguities of the American dream. By situating ideas associated with gambling, such as “take all” and “tilt,” alongside kinetic imagery suggestive of the flashing lights and neon glare of pinball and slot machines, Mr. Indiana celebrates the promise and fantasy of American prosperity while also acknowledging the failures of American ethics.

Here Mr. Indiana harnessed the cheerful and reassuring language of mass advertising and the visual cacophony of roadside gambling establishments to communicate a message that was simultaneously dark and celebratory. With its flat, high-keyed color and hard-edge, staccato forms, the painting evoked both the pains and joys of American life, openly acknowledging what Mr. Indiana called “all the meaner aspects of life” while testifying to America as “the best of all possible worlds.”

In this painting, Mr. Indiana allied himself with both America’s literary and visual past by paying dual homage to Charles Demuth and William Carlos Williams, whose poem “The Great Figure” (1921) Demuth had memorialized in his painting “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” (1928). Mr. Indiana saw Demuth as a precursor — an artist who had worked in a crisp Precisionist style and used words and numbers symbolically. Drawing his image of the figure five directly from Demuth’s composition, Mr. Indiana inscribed “1928” and “1963” in his painting’s center panel to indicate the years in which Demuth and he completed their respective works. He placed the four other panels in the shape of a cross to symbolize the head, arms and feet of the human body, as well as the division of the world into four elements: existence, love, survival and sin, as conveyed by the words “die,” “hug,” “eat” and “err.”

Throughout his career, Mr. Indiana used his art to address political and ethical issues, particularly those involving civil rights and peace. This painting calls attention to the legacy of racial injustice in America, as epitomized by the slave ship Rebecca. After depositing African slaves in Cuba in the 19th century, the ship loaded provisions near what would become Mr. Indiana’s neighborhood, Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan.

The words “eat” and “die” held deeply personal meanings for Mr. Indiana — from the ubiquitous “EAT” signs that adorned diners in the Midwest to his mother’s last words to him before dying: “Have you had enough to eat?” Yet the two words also express something so fundamental about the life cycle that they need no interpretation. Their declarations of rage, triumph, fear and warning possess a directness and universality that Mr. Indiana likened to the Ten Commandments.

Mr. Indiana first created this now-famous design as a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. He submitted the design in four different color combinations, and the museum chose the most chromatically intense: red, blue and green. Mr. Indiana’s associations with the word “love” were ambiguous. His family had never used it, and, from all accounts, his adult relationships had made him wary of the fragility and precariousness of love. “Love is a dangerous commodity — fraught with peril,” he said. LOVE’s tilted “O,” which threatens to fall off the otherwise stable design, implicitly critiqued the often hollow sentimentality associated with the word, metaphorically suggesting unrequited longing and disappointment rather than saccharine affection. Yet what ultimately makes the image so powerful and resilient is its ability to contain multiple, even contradictory, meanings simultaneously.