When asked to describe his art, Robert Indiana once offered, “Let’s say it’s the three C’s—commemorative, celebratory and colorful.” Throughout his decades-long career, Indiana created bold, graphic art punctuated by text and numbers. Bright and jarring color combinations accentuated Indiana’s exploration of the relationship between word and image.
Born Robert Clark in Newcastle, Indiana, in 1928, the artist moved around frequently as a child during the Great Depression. He relocated to Indianapolis to attend a technical high school where he was able to study painting. Indiana then enlisted in the Army Air Force and served for three years, stationed at bases around the country. His service granted him access to GI Bill benefits to fund further studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in Europe, where he solidified his resolve to work as an artist.
Indiana arrived in New York City in 1954. To make ends meet he found work at an art supply store, where he met fellow artists James Rosenquist and Ellsworth Kelly. They would become Indiana’s friends and neighbors on Coenties Slip, a street at the southeastern edge of Manhattan where the artists occupied (in some cases illegally) former sailmaking and industrial lofts. Indiana’s other neighbors at the Slip included Jack Youngerman, Delphine Seyrig, Agnes Martin, and Lenore Tawney. The group worked in conversation with one another, experimenting and progressing each of their unique styles. In Indiana’s case, his way of using color was affected by Kelly’s practice.
The neighborhood itself also influenced the inhabitants of Coenties Slip. Indiana in particular made a series of sculptures he referred to as herms, including Moon (1960) and French Atomic Bomb (1959–60), from ship and construction debris left in large quantities around the rapidly changing neighborhood. Indiana reflected, “The constructions like this came into being because many of the old warehouses were being razed in the neighborhood and the wood was just lying around waiting to be picked up.” For Indiana, using the materials around him was an exercise “in natural finishes like rust and patination of wood and the harmonies were very close and earthy.”
These sculptures were also some of Indiana’s first experiments with incorporating text into his art. Law (1960–62), for example, features the Latin word for law, “Lex,” stenciled in block letters on the face of the sculpture. For Indiana, “the constructions just needed the words. They did not look complete without them.” He later thought of this concept as the “verbal-visual,” which he used to refer to “the very elementary part that language plays in man’s thinking processes.” Indiana would investigate this relationship throughout his career, reiterating his feeling that language was essential to perception and knowledge and therefore should be represented in art.
His exploration of text and image also referenced the graphic language of highway signage that punctuated the Midwestern landscape where he grew up, along with the mass media culture blossoming as the artist came of age in the 1950s. His paintings, methodically created to be eye-catching, shared the flat and hard-edged qualities inherent, in the artist’s view, to any good sign. In these works, Indiana took care to invoke words charged with meaning. The painting The American Dream, I (1961) was the first in a series responding to the economic and social hopes around what the country could offer its citizens. Combining numbers and phrases like “tilt,” or “take all” with a geometric design of targets and stars organized into quadrants, the designs seem to reference road signs and military emblems (as in one circle colored red, white, and blue), but the contrasting colors throughout evade simple explanation. He later reflected on the first few in the cycle, “I was really being very critical of certain aspects of the American experience. ‘Dream’ was used in an ironic sense. Then, as they progressed, they lost that irony.”
Perhaps Indiana’s most recognizable composition is an arrangement of the word LOVE in which the letters “L” and “O” are stacked above “V” and “E” in a bold typeface, the colors of which were inspired by the Phillips 66 gasoline signs he grew up seeing. In choosing the word “love,” Indiana felt “it could simply be a really universal painting.” The design started as a Christmas card Indiana sent to friends—including MoMA curator Dorothy Miller, who subsequently commissioned Indiana to create one for the Museum (which produced and sold Christmas cards as a fundraiser at the time). Indiana translated Love into three-dimensional sculptures, paintings, and even jewelry.
Indiana’s visual language was highly precise and provocative, representing a particular kind of American expression deeply influenced by his own experiences. Indiana explained, “By nature, I am a keeper. I just don’t discard things…. And in a sense, my art is really a reflection of that. There’s no experience I’ve had that cannot be pulled upon, cannot be used, that I would refrain from using. And I enjoy that. It’s part of the process of my work. And there’s a very sentimental aspect to all of this.”
Rachel Remick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2025
