The Art of Robert
Indiana
His artwork looks like road signs you might see along the highway. Sometimes they tell you about his life—the roads he's traveled and what's happened to him along the way. Sometimes they show what he enjoys, like poems and surprising stories. And sometimes they encourage us to do what he thinks we should—like "EAT" and "LOVE." "Some people
like to paint trees," he said. "I like to paint love.
Born in 1928 at New Castle, Indiana, as Robert Clark, between 1945 and 1948 he studied at art schools in Indianapolis and Utica, NY, from 1949 to 1953 at the Chicago Art Institute School and the Skowhgan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. In 1953 and 1954 he studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and London University, after which he settled in New York where he took up contact with the painters Kelly, Smith and Youngerman. His early works were inspired by traffic signs, automatic amusement machines, commercial stencils and old trade names. In the early sixties he did sculpture assemblages and developed his style of vivid color surfaces, involving letters, words and numbers. In 1966 he had exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Eindhoven (Van Abbemuseum), Krefeld (Museum Haus Lange) and Stuttgart (Württembergische Kunstverein). He was represented at the Documenta "4" Exhibition, Kassel, in 1968. He became known for silkscreen prints, posters and sculptures which took the word LOVE as their theme. The brash directness of these works stemmed from their symmetrical arrangements of color and form.
"By nature I am
a keeper. I just don’t discard things. Recent Exhibitions: Virginia Lust Gallery, New York; Lorenzelli Arte, Milan; National Museum of American Art, Washington DC; William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Multiples, New York; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Newberger Museum, Purchase, New York; University Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, New Mexico; Galerie Denise René, New York; GalerieIm Haus Behr, Hindenburgbau, Stuttgart; Galerie De Gestlo, Bremen; Overbeck Gesellschaft, Lubeck; Galerie Christoph Durr, Munich; Galerie Droscher-Furneisen, Hamburg; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruge; Amerika Haus, Berlin; Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire; Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Creighton University, Omaha; Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania. Public Collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan; Allentown Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Brandeis Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts; Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, New York; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum, California; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California. * from Robert
Indiana, 13, 173, 207, Harry N. Abrams, 1990.
Excerpt
pertaining to his years at Tech, from: RB: RICHARD
BROWN BAKER RB: Yes. Tell us where you went to high school, what city or town? RI: This was Indianapolis. The high school was Arsenal Tech, which is essentially a tech school - technical - but it is also a very large school which offered a very wide range of subjects. In my last year - in my senior year in high school I spent, oh, between two-thirds and four-fifths of my time in painting classes, you see. And this wouldn't have been possible in the average American high school. RB: No, that surprises me. Were you not obliged to have, say, a minimum of science, of languages, and athletics? RI: One was obliged, but I satisfied those requirements before my senior year. RB: Tell us, for instance, what the language obligations that you faced were? RI: There were no language obligations. It was not a requirement, but it just so happened that I took four years of Latin. And that was my own preference. RB: You did that voluntarily? RI: Yes. RB: Took Latin, but you took no modern languages? RI: No, I didn't. RB: Did you ever later? RI: No, no. RB: I'm curious. No requirement for modern languages at all. Now, what about the requirements for science? RI: Oh, I think it was one year of one science, and that happened to be physics in my case, which I satisfied half of it, in a summer school course, just so it wouldn't interfere with my painting in the senior years. RB: Did you do well in mathematics? RI: I did all right in mathematics. It was one of my least-favorite subjects. RB: Well, how did you get concentrated so early then on painting? We've sort of skipped from that first teacher. Can you remember some of your other painting teachers? RI: Actually, it's a big gap, Dick, from that first instructor, who was very sympathetic, and a very warm, human teacher. RB: Well, now tell us a little more about the high school experience itself. Who was your art teacher there? RI: Well, I had a different instructor for the first two years each term, which meant two different instructors each year. Then the last two years were almost exclusively under the instruction of a little, marvelous old lady named Sarah Bard. . . RB: B a r d? RI: B a r d. And whether she is still alive I'm not really sure at this particular point. She had a fairly successful career of her own. She was a watercolorist and, oh, won all kinds of prizes and so forth, which. . . RB: Locally? RI: Yes, which greatly impressed her students. And we were all very much in awe of her and I was very much in awe of her, and she was a great character and a terrifically-inspiring instructor. And she alone was responsible for my decision to go to the Art Institute in Chicago. RB: What sort of recollections do you have of Miss Bard's own painting? RI: Well, out of her own wisdom, Dick, she didn't really let us see her own work. There was one exhibit of her watercolors in Indianapolis at a - at what would be the equivalent of Indianapolis's only gallery (it was an art supply store), and so I did see them and at that time I was very impressed by them. They were very accomplished, beautiful watercolors. . . RB: Can you say something about the character of the work you yourself were doing as a high school painter? RI: Well, first of all, in high school at that time, (I imagine it is very different now) we were not allowed to work in oils unless it might have been the last year, and I did my first oil painting at the Art Institute in Chicago. So obviously I didn't take advantage of that freedom. Watercolor, I thought was my medium and I used to go out on weekends and paint landscapes around Indianapolis and even had a one-man show while I was still a senior in high school. RB: How did you arrange that? RI: Well, there again, as I said, there was this very active art department. There probably were six or eight instructors in it and they had a very, a fairly high sense of purpose, and they encouraged this sort of thing. RB: Where was the show held - in the high school? RI: There was a show in the high school; there was an exhibition area; and then there was a show at this local art store that I spoke of. RB: There also might have been, I don't know, but it might have been easier of access. Did you have your own car or anything at this time? RI: No, I had a bicycle and I used to go out on my bicycle and take my kit of watercolors. However, the campus of this particular high school - this is an old Civil War arsenal in Indianapolis and it was situated on a very landscaped campus of seventy-five acres with even a little virgin forest in one corner, so that there was ample opportunity to paint trees and landscapes if I wanted to. RB: Well, I think we have got pretty much through your high school, though I would like to have you say a little more about that interest in journalism that developed at that time. RI: Yes, there again, it was due to the influence of a strong teacher. RB: I believe you mentioned that and I forget whether you said the name. RI: I didn't. Her name is Ella Sengenberger, and she was one of those extremely dedicated teachers who instilled and imbued in their students all kinds of extra-special enthusiasms and I fell under her influence. She was a teacher very much recommended to me by people who had recommended this particular high school. And I myself, I had always enjoyed writing. I had once -- one of the few prizes I ever won was a composition prize in English literature when I was in high school. So that I did have this interest in writing besides. . . RB: What was her actual role? Was she your English teacher? RI: No, no. This was a large enough school that her sole domain was journalism. In fact, she only had one or two journalism classes. Her real role was director of publications. She was responsible for putting out the school paper and the school yearbook. RB: You had a sort or school magazine then? Were you one of the editors or contributors? RI: I was on the staff. The publication was called the "Arsenal Cannon" because of the fact that the school had once been a Civil War arsenal. I contributed, I was a reporter, and I wrote feature articles and I also was photography editor for the yearbook. RB: I'm not familiar with the concept of teaching journalism in high school. I don't know what it consists in, as a course. What is it designed to prepare you for? RI: It's designed, with this school, in that it was such a technical school, to prepare those students who really wanted to pursue a journalistic education, in other words, going to a school of journalism at some college later, you see. RB: Do you think some of those students in your class did become newspaper or magazine people? RI: Oh, I know they did. Yes. RB: Well, it seems to me slightly early to be concentrating on that aspect, however. . . RI: It was no more intensive than my, than the concentration on my art program, because the last year at high school I spent something like six hours in the painting and drawing department, you see. RB: Do you think some of those students in your class did become newspaper or magazine people? RI: Oh, I know they did. Yes. RB: Well, it seems to me slightly early to be concentrating on that aspect, however. . . RI: It was no more intensive than my, than the concentration on my art program, because the last year at high school I spent something like six hours in the painting and drawing department, you see. RB: But the teaching of English in the traditional way, which means of course writing compositions and also reading select works of literature, possible classics or perhaps superior contemporary books - did you also have this kind of training? RI: Yes, sure. RB: But that was a separate course, was it? RI: Yes, that was. Journalism was only one course in the English program that you might take. As i suggested, this was a very complex school, Richard, and all those other courses were available. RB: Well, I'm thinking of what the requirements are for the College Board entrance examinations in English and so on. This journalism, of course, wouldn't have been designed presumably to prepare one for that kind of an examination. I suppose most of you were not preparing to enter regular college, were you, like Harvard, Yale, Williams, and this sort of thing? RI: A college preparatory program could very well have included the journalism course just as an elective, and this was not an exceptional situation. Some of my fellow journalism students did go on to places like Harvard. RB: They did? Well, I wanted to ask if you wrote poetry at any time in your childhood? RI: I did. I wrote poetry particularly in high school. One of those poems, as I remember, called "October" was published on the front page of one of the issues of the school paper, and, of course, I did a great deal of writing subsequently. During my four years in Chicago, not so, but when I went to England, much more writing than painting, and then upon my return to New York or to America, when I lived in New York I continued to write a great deal. RB: Let's go in to that when we get to that advanced stage. Actually at the moment I didn't even know you had gone to England. So tell me a little more about this poem "October." Was it in any particular traditional from like a sonnet or. . .? RI: No. More in the form - probably more under the influence of Carl Sandburg's "Fog," a very short poem probably only six or seven lines. RB: Your activity on the school magazine was principally reporting? RI: Not principally. That's as, shall we say, an apprentice or beginner, that's how one started. Also proofreading, chores like that, but my main contribution to the paper was certain - I was particularly interested in architecture at this time and I remember writing two articles on famous old houses in Indianapolis. And one of them I illustrated myself with pen and ink sketches. RB: What was the character of the article? Was it historical or an account of the house, a description of it architecturally, or a plea to preserve it from destruction? RI: No, there was none of that because at that time neither one were due (one has been demolished) but neither one were due for demolition. Just a descriptive article probably written to interest other students in the architectural gems that existed in the city more than anything else. RB: You chose these topics yourself, or were you assigned. . .? RI: I chose them myself. RB: That represents your personal taste, then, doesn't it, I mean, your interest? RI: I've always been interested in architecture and probably at one point in my life would have seriously considered taking it up, but I was under the impression that to be an architect one should be very strong in mathematics and be a little bit more scientifically inclined than I was and therefore I saw this as a detriment to a career in architecture. RB: You mentioned to me that you had had quite a variety of jobs while you were at Arsenal High. I don't think I asked -- these were evening jobs you indicated? RI: After school. RB: After school. But I realized I had never asked whether you had summer jobs as such, vacation-time, full-time jobs? RI: The jobs that I had, Richard, tended to extend over into the summer on a full-time basis. When I was a Western Union messenger, that became a full-time job during the summer. And when I worked for the Indianapolis Star in the advertising department that, too, became a full-time job.
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