Robert Indiana, influential American artist, in front of some of his art.
Robert Indiana rose to prominence in New York in the 1960s with his now-iconic LOVE artworks. He made several important contributions to Pop Art, assemblage art, and hard-edged painting. Although he withdrew from the public eye in later life, he is still widely considered as one of the most important artists of his generation.
Indiana experimented with different mediums in the course of his long career, including sculpture, printmaking, and painting. It is prints that dominate his market, accounting for 55% of the artist’s work sold at auction, and most fetch between £1,000 and £5,000.
Robert Indiana was a fairly private man, but his personal life undoubtedly influenced the artwork that he created; read on to discover six things you might not have known about Robert Indiana.
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He Had An Unusual Childhood
Robert Indiana was born in September 1928 in New Castle, Indiana. He was adopted in infancy by Earl and Carmen Clark, and named Robert Earl Clark. His childhood and adolescence were spent moving frequently between different addresses and ZIP codes; the artist later claimed that by his 17th birthday, he’d lived in 21 different homes, recalling “It seemed that half my life was spent in an automobile”. He adopted the surname ‘Indiana’ after moving to New York in the 1950s, both as a nod towards his native state, and to help himself stand out with a more unique name.
His Most Expensive Prints Sold For £125,000
The Book of Love is a series of 12 screenprints from 1996, each accompanied by an individual poem written by Robert Indiana on the theme of love. Published more than three decades since Indiana first started experimenting with LOVE, the series remains extremely sought-after in today’s market, accounting for 24 of the artist’s 30 most expensive prints sold at auction, thereby demonstrating quite how popular and enduring the composition is. One set of The Book of Love prints was sold by Phillips in June 2023 for £125,000, setting a new record for the artist.
The Book of Love sold by Phillips in 2023
LOVE Was First Popularised in 1965
In 1965, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) used Robert Indiana’s LOVE design on its annual Christmas cards. The artist had been experimenting with the word in his artwork for a few years already, but it was only after this that it became world-famous.
Since then, Indiana’s LOVE has been replicated, appropriated, and adapted countless times, often without the artist’s assent. LOVE has become a true icon of modern art, and its enduring appeal to a range of audiences is reflected in its popularity at auction; Indiana himself returned to the theme time and time again throughout his career, experimenting with different colour combinations and layouts. It’s telling that the three most popular of the artist’s prints are The Book of Love, A Garden of Love, and Four Panel Love, which are all variations on the theme that made Indiana’s name.
He Made Art For Obama’s Presidential Campaign
In 2008, Robert Indiana began making art featuring the word HOPE to support Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. ‘Hope’ and ‘Love’ are both optimistic and versatile four-letter words, and their letters are also similar enough that Indiana could repurpose the design (block capitals stacked into a square with a tilted ‘O’) which made LOVE so famous.
The artist once said “I’d like to cover the whole world with hope”, and, to some extent, he achieved this with his HOPE motif, which, like LOVE, has been featured in artworks seen around the globe. Along with LOVE, HOPE compositions are regularly among Indiana’s most popular work at auction, with one set of prints titled Four Seasons of Hope (Silver), for instance, having been sold by Menzies Art Brands in November 2022 for £23,407.
Hope by Robert Indiana
He Loved Numbers
Robert Indiana was fascinated by numbers all his life, once saying: “My involvement with numbers, my first real consciousness about them is simply the fact that I lived in 21 different houses before I was 17 years old”; to him, “each of those houses had a number.” Indeed, the artist frequently ordered his life using numbers, believing that “each one is loaded with multiple references and significances.”
Though Indiana is best known for his artwork involving words, he also made many pieces relating to numbers, including the less than imaginatively titled Numbers prints from 1968. In many ways, numbers were more important to him than words; as he once claimed: “Numbers fill my life. They fill my life even more than love. We are immersed in numbers from the moment we’re born. Love? Love is like a cherry on top of the whipped cream.”
LOVE Also Had Its Problems
Even though LOVE ensured Robert Indiana’s place in the art world, it was, as the saying goes, a double-edged sword. The artist once said: “LOVE bit me. It was a marvellous idea, but also a terrible mistake” because “it became too popular.”
Yet, whilst LOVE’s fame grew, Indiana never reached the same level of recognition as some of his contemporaries; in his own words, “Everybody knows my LOVE, but they don’t have the slightest idea what I look like. I’m practically anonymous.”
Though he continued to work, Indiana slowly withdrew from the public spotlight, a process hastened when he abandoned the New York art world in 1978 and moved to a remote island in Maine, stating, “There are people who don’t like popularity. It’s much better to be exclusive and remote.” It was here that he made The Hartley Elegies paintings which later inspired the prints, and it was here that he died in May 2018, at the age of 89.
