Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana’s work is rooted in acts of transformation. From the weathered wood, rusted wheels, discarded architectural elements, and commercial stencils he found around Coenties Slip to the hard-edge paintings and monumental word sculptures for which he became known, Indiana repeatedly converted the overlooked and the ordinary into highly charged artistic form. His own description of this process as the transmutation of ‘the lost into the found, junk into art, the neglected into the wanted, the unloved into the loved, dross into gold’ provides a key to understanding the material, formal, and symbolic logic of his work. What emerges is an art in which found objects, signs, language, memory, and personal history are continually transformed—an artistic process that Indiana himself defined as ‘alchemy.’

In the following, the material qualities of paint, the support, and the sculptures will be analyzed as signs of modernism in the sense of Monika Wagner’s material-based “other history of modernism.”² Wagner refers to William Turner as a key artist in a line of development that she traces, where Turner marks the starting point, continuing through Gustave Courbet, Jean Dubuffet and culminating with Claes Oldenburg and Joseph Beuys in the second half of the twentieth century. To provide a conceptual foundation, a contextualization of Indiana’s use of materials is an important first step.

Materiality and the Traces of the Past

In 1894, August Strindberg turned to randomly emerging objects like pieces of coal taken from the oven, the form of tossed pillows, or street noises: “In my stove, I burned a sort of coal that is called ‘sparrows’ heads’ because it is round and smooth. One day, when the fire had gone out before all the fuel was consumed, I poked out a bit of coal of a fantastic shape. A cock’s head with a splendid comb, the trunk almost like a human body with distorted limbs, it looked just like one of the demons that used to perform in the witches’ sabbaths of the Middle Ages. The next day I got out a capital group of two gnomes in billowing garments embracing each other, a masterpiece of primitive sculpture.”³ These found pieces in turn recall the objets trouvés photographed by Brassai as Sculptures involontaires: a sea shell (1933), a piece of soap (ca. 1930) or a rolled-up bus ticket (1932).⁴ They are unintentionally formed sculptures shaped by chance, independent of the artistic producer. Kurt Schwitters created fragments of reality⁵ using “urban refuse”⁶ as the raw material in his Merz works, thus creating a literal connection to the object. Even with the deformation of a ticket by, say, ripping it, the fragment of reality remains an actual representation of itself. As Dadaist Marcel Janco vividly describes it, “We ‘painted’ with scissors, adhesives, plaster, sacking, paper and other new tools and materials; we made collages and montages.”⁷ To that extent, Schwitters “painted” with paint and “refuse,” that he selected, shaped, and recontextualized. Schwitters expanded his collages of invalidated tram tickets, food rationing stamps, labels, cigarette packs, rags, twines, feathers, and advertisements with other three-dimensional objects such as pieces of wood, wheels, spokes, cigarette butts, jar lids, rusty nails, and pieces of metal to assemblages. He ripped, broke, hammered and pasted: “I’m a painter, I nail my paintings together.”⁸

In 1959, Indiana, in contrast, began painting circles in geometric arrangements like pre-cut stencils with white gesso “on the only material he could afford: weathered plywood, mostly using the grain of the board as his ground”⁹ (ill. 3-studio with Orbs p. 23 Haskell 2013). In 2001, he transferred these works with gold paint to Twenty-One Golden Orbs (cat. 2) or Twenty Golden Orbs (cat. 3), always using the grain of the wood as a visual element. Here, the use of weathered plywood was of special importance, because both the traces of the grayed-material weathered by sun, rain, and snow became part of the visual support and the painting’s ground, where the gaps in the circles or the double gingko leaf (cat. 4) remain visible and become part of the final work as fragments of reality. This is comparable to Edvard Munch, who subjected his works to the natural elements as part of his “kill or cure treatment,”¹⁰ in this way accelerating the aging process of the work, and introducing the factor of time as exposition time and decay as an expression of temporality. The traces of weathering, such as washed-out paint and foundation, elude his direct control, which is limited to interrupting of the natural process of the works’ weathering. The introduction of the apparently unintentional as well as Munch’s joy in experimentation reveal parallels to Strindberg. Like the Swedish artist, Munch integrated the factor of chance with his “kill or cure treatment” into his artistic creation, by not only imitating nature’s approach to creation, but allowing nature itself to create.¹¹ Although Indiana did not subject his works to a “kill or cure treatment” and initially only used these materials partly out of financial necessity, he recognized and worked with the preexisting aesthetics of these finds as part of his works and emphasized the aesthetic qualities of the materials: “the weathered wood was so beautiful.”¹²

In the subsequent year, Indiana increasingly began to turn to assemblages and constructions: “the wood was just lying around waiting to be picked up . . . assemblage was kind of in the air.”¹³ In so doing, the artist selected the found materials precisely as fragments of reality, unlike the other Pop artists, forgoing comics, Coca Cola bottles, and other objects of the booming consumer society. He resisted the use of such objects in this way, unlike Tom Wesselmann—who, incidentally, like all the artists subsumed under the term Pop Art also fundamentally rejected the term,¹⁴ although Wesselmann admitted: “I was a pop artist to the extent that I deliberately chose American imagery.”¹⁵

In 1959, Indiana began to develop his “herms,” (cat. III. 3) using old wooden planks, rusty metal wheels, and the remains of shipping that he found in the abandoned warehouses around his studio at 25 Coenties Slip. The wooden planks came from “100-year-old beams, resulting from nearby demolition on the 19th century New York wharf section,”¹⁶ that Indiana appropriated. With the term “herms,” the artist referred to the rectangular stone pillars that in ancient Greece and Rome served as border markers and protective stones at intersections and in groves and vineyards and were usually crowned by the head of Hermes as the God of travel and the roadways and featured a phallus as a reference to sexual potency.¹⁷ Indiana created a whole range of different herms (cat. 5, 6, 7, 8) with a basic structure of massive, vertically towering wooden beams, topped with a simple wooden construction like the head of Hermes and featuring one or several wheels. In the lower parts of the herms Hole, Chief, Eat, Orb, and Two, there is a wheel mounted on the left and right, where at the same time in the lower part a phallus is evoked with a piece of spar. Their titles are always added in a stencil-like fashion, combined with orbs, signs, and numerals. Material and signs thus fuse to form an object that seems to take up function of the ancient herms as border-markers and protection.¹⁸ Thus, the herms can be read on the one hand as a historical recourse and at the same time archaeologically, as pieces in which traces of recent history and civilization are contained in the material itself. Initially, the “herms” were not polychromatic, but borne by the found aesthetic of these weathered materials, rust and wood patina; Indiana only added the painted parts during his modification process from 1960 to 1962.¹⁹ In a review of his first solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in the fall of 1962, signed “S.T.” (most likely Sidney Tillim), the critic separates Indiana from Pop Art because of his approach to materiality. He notes that the texture of the totem of “thick slabs of grainy wood and ancient wheels” counters a “plastic aridity.” He calls them “hirsute, archaistic fetishes” that bear engraved words such as “hold,” “moon,” and “mate,” and emphasizes the medium of wood and the wheel object as central, by no means neutral elements.²⁰

Like Indiana, Mark di Suvero used weathered beams from demolition sites for monumental sculptures draped with chains, such as the asymmetrical construction Hankchampion(1960) made of eight heavy wooden beams (ill. 5).²¹ Starting in 1958/59, Carl Andre in turn—who was in those years in the circle of Frank Stella’s studio—initially took the wood from used material for his early Ladders and Pyramids, influenced by Brancusi (ill. 6). But when Stella, while walking around one of the works, commented on the untreated side of the beam, “That’s sculpture, too,” ²² Andre turned to using standardized timber and as of 1965 commercially obtained materials.²³ While di Suvero shared with Indiana the idea of the weathered wood as part of the sculpture, Andre distanced himself from this.

Indiana locates the red-green-blue shades added later²⁴ in his father’s Phillips-66 gas station (ill. 7)—"red and green against the blue sky”—an additional autobiographical sign that he summed up with “his [Indiana’s father’s] sign; my sign.”²⁵ Indiana understood his herms as “really built” and approached them using detailed construction plans (ill. 8, 9).²⁶

LOVE and Pop Art

Yet it was not this material, sculptural practice that made Indiana world-famous, but a single word-image that would come to overshadow it. There is hardly a work in art history that has left such a profound mark on our collective visual memory and has become so completely independent from its creator as Robert Indiana’s Love: the word “love” written on two lines in capital letters with the “O” tipped 45 degrees to the right. The artist created this work for the first time as a series of rubbings²⁷ and made his first paintings of the motif in 1965. This characteristic arrangement of letters soon advanced to become a global symbol of love and peace in the spirit of the counterculture of the late 1960s.

Speaking about Love, Indiana noted that it came “from a spiritual rather than an erotic beginning.”²⁸ Accordingly, the motif is less rooted in love and romanticism than in the absence of images in the Christian Science churches of his childhood, whose austere interiors were solely decorated with golden inscriptions like “God is love,”²⁹ which Indiana reversed in 1964 to “Love is God” on a diamond-shaped grisaille canvas (cat. 1). In retrospect, he considered this the point of departure for the subsequent LOVE series, as it “really set off the long chain that LOVE has become,” ³⁰ LOVE generated a dialectic between a personal biographic and at the same time spiritual sign and the reproduction of this idea to a global mass image, the “most plagiarized work of art.”³¹ Love contributed to pigeonholing Indiana as a Pop artist, a label which he always rejected. After the Second World War, many artists subsumed into the category of Pop Art rose up against the dominance of abstract expressionism and informel, explicitly turning to the virtually exploding world of consumerism. In their “New Realism,”³² they declared the products of the consumer world the icons of the postwar world, including the US flag, cars, and portraits of American presidents, and reflected clichés, fantasies, and the great American dream. In contrast to the British Pop Art of Richard Hamilton, Pop Art from New York was more radical and direct in its visual language. Taking Marcel Duchamp’s questioning of the art object and authorship as an inspiration, artists such as Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, Marjorie Strider and James Rosenquist distanced themselves from the paradigm of abstract expressionism that had been dominant until then, but by using very different stylistic devices and points of departure. The leisure culture that was able to develop in the postwar years as an expression of a sense of individual freedom is reflected in their works.³³

More than a decade after the end of the Second World War, those artists considered representatives of Pop Art share with Indiana on the one hand a countermovement to abstract expressionism, and on the other hand a fundamental obliteration of the distinction between art and everyday life. With their striking and overtly graphic visual icons and in part garish, intense colors, Pop Art explored the question of what freedom, reality, and everyday life mean in a capitalist consumer society. As early as 1963, Indiana sought to set himself apart from Pop Art in a conversation with Richard Brown Baker. He labelled Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rosenquist, and Wesselmann the actual “pure” pop artists, stating that it is “the formal aspect of my painting which fascinates me most.”³⁴ He explained his proximity to Pop Art as merely tangential, due to his EAT pictures derived from street signs (ill. 1, 2). This distancing himself from Pop Art is also reflected in the approach to materiality and its significance in his oeuvre.

Reality Fragments Versus Hard-Edge Painting

The herms were followed in 1963/64 with wooden columns with word repetitions in white paint, such as EAT, DIE, LOVE, HUG, and ERR, and combinations of these words (cat. 9, 10). These columns “were originally the masts of old sailing ships, and you can still see the worn areas where the iron rings . . . were once fitted onto. Then they became columns for these warehouses that were built after the fire of 1835.”³⁵ With the columns, he reduces the assemblage to a wooden sculpture—whose plinth was made by Richard Artschwager—as the bearer of words: “no other material being added to them except words painted around the perimeter.”³⁶ Like Stella’s indication that the materiality and texture is part of the sculpture, Indiana noted: “I think there’s validity in the ‘foundness’ of the object.”³⁷

But while the artist declared the materiality and the traces of history of the weathered wood to be central to these sculptural works, transforming “the lost into the found, junk into art, the neglected into the wanted, the unloved into the loved,”³⁸ he undertook the final step from “dross into gold, hence: alchemy” in his hard-edge paintings, characterized by absolute perfection. In the oeuvre of this artist, there seems to be an inherent contradiction: he seems to alternate between emphasizing texture and materiality and rejecting all aged surfaces. In contrast to Jasper Johns’ haptic surface structures, whose encaustic technique compresses and condenses the pictorial body,³⁹ in his hard-edge paintings such as Love is God or Gingko Indiana reduces (cat. 1, 4) virtually all textures that could communicate haptics and corporeality. While the indexical corporeality of Johns, with traces of real materials, impressions and body fragments, shows parallels in terms of “it was thus” to Indiana’s wood sculptures and assemblages with the traces of the past of his reality fragments—“the weathered wood was so beautiful,”⁴⁰ Indiana strictly rejects this in his paintings, focusing on signs, letters, words and numerals, colors, and shapes. As the artist himself puts it, this creates a “separation between my painting and the constructions.”⁴¹ This aesthetic of the found materials—“natural finishes like rust and patination of wood,” whose harmonies are “very close and earthy”⁴²—seems to explain the contrast between intensely colorful oil paintings and the wooden columns and bronzes in his exhibition installations. In this way, he combines shapes like those of the wheel: “the wheel is merely a physical projection of the circle. So it was just a natural find.”⁴³ Here, materiality, form and spirituality come together in the circle/orb motif, and the wheels on Hole, Ge, Ahab, Bar, Chief, Eat, Orb and Two appear as the material projections of a circle. At the same time, the found, trash, the neglected becomes wanted, is transformed into art, the rawness of the sculptures is honed and smoothed over in the paintings to perfection, where the unloved becomes loved and dross is transformed into gold. In this way, the combination of these highly different techniques, surfaces, and ideas seems to characterize Indiana’s Kunstwollen. This explains the bronze versions of the original wooden herms from the year 1991 (cat. 11, 12), since the artist preserved the traces of the past and their haptic quality in these perfect casts for eternity. The material here signifies wood, but is bronze, and remains nonetheless a sign for wood and marks the semiotic shift in Indiana’s word works.

Accidental Finds and the Materiality of Text and Paint

But the letters and numbers are also ultimately based on accidental finds in the abandoned lofts: commercial bronze stencils such as numbers, sail names, company names from the nineteenth century became the “matrix and substance for my painting and drawing.”⁴⁴ The sign here emerges literally from the found raw material. Indiana describes the same technique later in his statement on The Great American Dream (ill. 10), where a found “nineteenth century brass stencil of a robust bull” becomes the center of frottages and links the found character of his early works to the found sign.⁴⁵ In this way, the found stencils become a sign of the material dimension of his work: wood, found materials, stencils, paint, and raw material.⁴⁶ For Indiana also treats paint expressly as a raw material. In the Stable Gallery statement from 1962, he coined the term “combustible polychromy,” alongside the stark visual contrast of the hard-edge painting.⁴⁷ The X-5 (ill. 11), his first painting entirely in black, white, and gray, marked the material opposite, “a considerable departure from the general polychromy” of the other works.⁴⁸

While his raw materials, such as wood and found stencils, largely came from interior spaces, his artistic vocabulary derived from the exterior of the American street, like the “EAT” panels advertising roadside diners as well as the black and yellow tin signs advertising the nonprescription cold medicine 666 “affixed to farmers’ fences,” which lined the fields alongside the signs advertising Burma shaving cream.⁴⁹

The EAT work for the 1964 New York World’s Fair (ill. 12) takes Indiana’s works outdoors, to the façade of Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion, where “flashing its imperative with real energy” it emitted its light to the public as an electric, blinking sign. Here, Indiana crossed the line between art and a sign of use, for the visitors actually thought the monumental “EAT” was advertising the presence of a real snack shop: as a result, fair management had the sign turned off on the very first day, but EAT remained on the façade for another two years, unlit.⁵⁰

Indiana bridges the gap to the sculptural third dimension in his artist statement on the LOVE sculpture from 1966. After several years without creating sculpture, he called this work the culmination of his work until that point in time, and at the same time a return to the third dimension. Originally conceived as the centerpiece for the LOVE exhibition at the Stable Gallery in May 1966, the initially small sculpture was developed in two directions. It served on the one hand as a model for the gold LOVE ring and formed at the same time a point of departure for the monumental version already planned by Indiana, “twelve feet high in steel.”⁵¹ The accompanying text explains the premise behind this: that the word is “an appropriated and usable element of art” and presents the wood constructions from 1959/60 as a point of departure.⁵² This basic conviction led to the numerous monumental LOVE sculptures in public space which were cast in various metals. For example, the three-ton LOVE made of Cor-ten steel, which is today located in front of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and beforehand was temporally installed in New York’s Central Park, described by Goodall as “a Christmas visit to Central Park in New York City.”⁵³ The word sign originally located inside was moved outside and became a public monument for love. Here the urban structure of the neglected and trash becomes something desirable and shiny.

Language and the Sign

The spiritual and semiotic aspect of Indiana’s work should always be kept in mind: “Know that the LOVE I am talking about is spiritual.” For example, he dedicated Black and White LOVE (1968) to Martin Luther King,⁵⁴ and with AHAVA (1977), Hebrew for “love,” he created multiple layers of meaning with the vertically read letters “av” for father and the double “hay” as a symbol of God or “God the Father,” which in turn refers back to the root “God is love.”⁵⁵ Donald B. Goodall set the metaphysical framework by preceding his essay in the exhibition catalog for the University of Texas (Austin) from 1977⁵⁶ with a motto from William James’ The Will to Believe from 1897: life is a “real fight,” a universe “which we . . . are needed to redeem,”⁵⁷ supporting the conceptual axis from Love Is God, the cross-shaped work The Ninth Love Cross (2001) (cat. 13) with AGAPE, AMOR, AMORE, LIEBE, EROS, AHAVA and STAR OF HOPE, the golden orbs as well as LOVE and AMOR. However, it should be kept in mind that he described his family as a “rather typical, non-religious American family,” while he himself attended Christian Science Sunday school as a child and briefly joined the church during his army years,⁵⁸ but later left: “I would profess to no religious affiliation.”⁵⁹

As far as language and semiotics are concerned, Indiana’s artistic concept can be read in his conversation with Baker as a contradiction, in which Baker suspects the “literary”; Indiana tries to be more precise, saying he prefers to speak of the “verbal-visual,” not the “literary.”⁶⁰ In this conversation, he regards language and semiotics as a factual unity of the sign, the object, and the perception of the beholders, “the word, the object, and the idea are almost inextricably lost in the mind.” Word, object, and idea are nearly inseparably fused in thought, so that their analytic separation, in contrast to artists from art history, is made pointless; he sees his technique not as literary, but as verbal-visual: “The artist has usually done it in the past. I prefer not to.”⁶¹ This is compounded by an almost phenomenological fusion of sign and thing, the depletion of meaning through concentration: if a word is looked at long enough, “one has almost forgotten what that word is,” an effect that he expressly wanted to include in his works.⁶² His poetics of the word derives from this: “I happen to prefer the verb to the noun. I use the simple command words first of all,” but Indiana adds: “I prefer the single word.”⁶³ And yet, the verbal in Indiana is always presented in dialogue with artistic formal aspects, and he emphasizes the latter: “It is the formal aspect of my painting which fascinates me most.“⁶⁴ This tension between sign and form is constitutive, and shapes the columns with DIE, LOVE, HUG/EAT/ERR, EAT, HUG just like the herm bronzes Eat, Bar, Orb, Ge, and Two. Indiana comments: “My art is a disciplined high dive . . . an exaltation of the verbal-visual . . . my dialogue.”⁶⁵ Indiana radicalizes this thought using a selection of words that consist exclusively of three- or four-letter words—EAT, DIE, HUG, ERR, LOVE—as a striking reduction of language, where words become elementary signs. In the spirit of his artistic intention, Indiana’s self-conception is derived: he saw himself as “an American painter of signs charting the course; I would be a people's painter as well as a painter's painter.”⁶⁶ Goodall anchors this historically in the sign painter, whom he considers the forebear of all American graphic design.⁶⁷ Indiana’s artistic use of words and numbers can here be placed in an art-historical line with Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Joseph Cornell and Charles Demuth and contemporaries, where words and numbers were “in the air,” just as with Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Johns, and Robert Motherwell. And yet, by emphasizing the American aspects, Indiana rejects the obvious European links to Apollinaire, cubism, and Dadaism as direct influences. His interest in typography was awakened early on in life: he worked with printing techniques at Edinburgh College of Art⁶⁸ and found the bronze stencils from the nineteenth century that became the foundation for his artistic alphabet at Coenties Slip.⁶⁹ And this is exactly what makes Indiana’s works so contemporary and explosive: their linguistic concision, monosyllabic words like advertising, marketing, and branding, that virtually burn themselves into the memory of the beholders.

William Katz describes Indiana’s artistic vocabulary as that of a formalist, a geometer, and a poet: “Geometry, Identity, Memory, and the encircling unity of these three.”⁷⁰ The found wood bears the written word of a poet that condenses to a spiritual sign. Every element here asserts its “thingness”: nothing is other than itself, the word is not a stand-in for the thing, but the thing itself, for the “word became image.”⁷¹ In his works, the materiality of the found exists in a productive tension with the perfect surfaces of the hard-edge paintings and the LOVE sculptures. Between found materials, words, numbers, signs, and forms, an artistic oeuvre emerges that is borne by contradiction and marked by continuing significance. The artistic technique that allows these elements to be transformed is the alchemy Indiana identified in 1961: during the New York building boom, trash became art, the neglected became wanted, and the unloved became loved—a process rooted in its moment of emergence but extending into our present and a still unwritten future.⁷²

— Dieter Buchhart
New York, Vienna, and Paris, May–July 2026

¹ Robert Indiana, “Artist Questionnaire Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 11, 1961”; available online: “Artist’s Statements/Writings,” Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné www.ricatalogueraisonne.org/section/?id=artists%20statement (viewed July 25, 2026).
² Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001).
³ August Strindberg, Inferno, trans. Mary Sandbach (London: Hutchinson, 1962), 51–52.
⁴ Brassaï, “Le pain ornemental et modern style échappe à la stéréotypie mole,” Minotaure: Revue artistique et literaire, nos. 3–4, (1933), 68.
⁵ See Christine Eckett, Kurt Schwitters: Zwischen Geist und Materie (Berlin: Reimer, 2012), 176–182.
⁶ Gottfried Boehm, Schwitters Arp (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 13, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Basel (May 1–August 22, 2004).
⁷ Marcel Janco, quoted in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 49.
⁸ Schwitters is supposed to have presented himself to Berlin’s Club Dada with these words. See Kurt Schwitters, Eile ist des Witzes Weile: Eine Auswahl aus den Texten Kurt Schwitters’, eds. Christina Weiss and Karl Riha (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), 151.
⁹ Barbara Haskell, “Robert Indiana: The American Dream,” in Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2013), 23, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (September 26, 2013–January 5, 2014).
¹⁰ Dieter Buchhart, Das Verschwinden im Werk Edvard Munchs. Experimente mit Materialisierung und Dematerialisierung, Universität Wien, 2004, 56 ff.
¹¹ Dieter Buchhart and Antonia Hoerschelmann, eds., Edvard Munch: Thema und Variation (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2003), 26f., exh. cat. Albertina, Wien (March 15–June 22, 2003).
¹² Baker, “Oral History Interview with Robert Indiana,” 115.
¹³ Ibid., 112.
¹⁴ The Estate of Tom Wesselmann, “Biography, 1963-1964,” https://www.tomwesselmannestate.org/about/biography/. (viewed July 24, 2026).
¹⁵ Quoted in Marco Livingstone: “Tom Wesselmann: Telling It Like It Is,” in Tom Wesselmann: A Retrospective Survey 1959–1992 (Tokyo: Art Life Ltd., 1993), 24.
¹⁶ Goodall, “Introduction,” 12; Robert Indiana, “Coenties Slip,” Richard Stankiewitz, Robert Indiana: An Exhibition of Recent Sculptures and Paintings, ed. Jan van der Marck (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1963), exh. cat. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (October 22–November 24, 1963), quoted in “Artist’s Statements/Writings.”
¹⁷ See for example Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Wood Works: Constructions by Robert Indiana (National Museum of Art / Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC 1984), 21.
¹⁸ “Conversations with Robert Indiana,” 26; on the etymology of “herms” see “Biography,” Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné.
¹⁹ Indiana, Goodall, “Conversations with Robert Indiana,” 26.
²⁰ “S.T.” (probably Sidney Tillim), in a review of several gallery shows including Indiana’s Stable Gallery exhibition: Arts Magazine (December 1962), 49.
²¹ The eight weathered beams and the chain in Hankchampion were “reclaimed from the artist’s downtown Manhattan neighborhood.” In: Whitney Museum of American Art, whitney.org, on Hankchampion, https://whitney.org/collection/works/820 (viewed July 24, 2026).
²² Quoted in James Meyer, ed., Carl Andre. Cuts: Texts 1959–2004 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 268.
²³ Andre “initially scavenged his materials from the streets of lower Manhattan,” before later ordering them from industrial providers. In: Lynn Woods: “Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place”, https://www.lynndwoods.com/carl-andre-sculpture-as-place/ (viewed July 26, 2026); Paula Cooper Gallery: „Carl Andre, Lynda Benglis, Frank Stella”, https://www.paulacoopergallery.com/exhibitions/carl-andre-lynda-benglis-frank-stella (viewed July 27, 2026).
²⁴ Indiana, Goodall, “Conversations with Robert Indiana,” 34. Overpainting is documented by 1962 at the latest: his most recent construction Gem, the artist wrote, follows the “new black direction, with little bare wood exposed.” In: Robert Indiana, letter to Rolf Nelson, July 7, 1962.
²⁵ Robert Indiana’s artist statement on the work EAT: in: Frank Popper, ed., Kunst Licht Kunst (New York: Mullen Books, Columbia 1966), exh. cat., Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (September 25–December 4, 1966), quoted in “Artist’s Statements/Writings,” Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné. See also Robert Indiana, artist’s statement on the work USA 666 (The Sixth American Dream). In: William C. Seitz, Lloyd Goodrich: São Paulo 9—United States of America: Edward Hopper [and] Environment U.S.A.: 1957–1967, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. 1967, quoted in “Artist’s Statements/Writings,” Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné.
²⁶ For more on the notion that these paintings are “really built,” see Indiana, Goodall, “Conversations with Robert Indiana,” 28.
²⁷ “Indiana first began experimenting with his stacked LOVE image in 1964, in a series of rubbings that he sent to friends as Christmas cards.” https://www.robertindiana.com/artworks/artworks-items/love (viewed July 24, 2026).
²⁸ Robert Indiana on Love Is God, quoted in “Artist’s Statements/Writings,” Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné.
²⁹ Christian-Science churches are not decorated with pictures; instead of pictures, the written word is used as wall decoration, usually one quotation from the Bible and one from Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first published in 1875). “God is love” (1 John 4:8) is one of the most common Biblical quotations used; Indiana emphasized it in particular (“God is Love is spelled out in every church”) and derived from it the reversal “Love is God” in 1964. Robert Indiana quoted in Vivien Raynor, “The Man Who Invented Love,” Art News (February 1973). On Christian Science church decoration, see Paul Eli Ivey, “American Christian Science Architecture and its Influence,” Mary Baker Eddy Library (June 16, 2011); Christian Science Sentinel, “Item of Interest” (November 10, 1934).
³⁰ Love Is God (1964; 68 × 68 inches, oil on canvas) was originally commissioned by Larry Aldrich for the opening of his museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, housed in a former Christian Science church. See Robert Indiana, “Artist Questionnaire, ‘LOVE Sculpture,’” Whitney Museum of American Art, Nov. 15 1968; Donald B. Goodall, “Introduction,” in: Robert Indiana (Austin: University Art Museum, 1977), 16 (Indiana’s letter to Larry Aldrich, 1973), exh. cat. University Art Museum, The University of Texas at Austin (September 25–November 6, 1977).
³¹ Ibid. See “Conversations with Robert Indiana,” in Robert Indiana.
³² John Ashbery, “The New Realism,” in The Tennis Court Oath: A Book of Poems (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 59–62.
³³ Dieter Buchhart, “Sea, Pop & Sun: On Freedom and Its Disappearance,” in Sea, Pop & Sun (Paris: Éditions Dilecta, 2026), exh. cat. Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles (April 25–November 1, 2026).
³⁴ Richard Brown Baker, “Oral History Interview with Robert Indiana, September 12–November 7, 1963,” in: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; available online: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-indiana-12936 (viewed July 25, 2026).
³⁵ Baker, “Oral History Interview with Robert Indiana,” 115.
³⁶ Ibid.
³⁷ Ibid.
³⁸ Indiana: Artist Questionnaire on the work Moon. Indiana calls Moon (Orb Moon) “a formal study in wood, gesso and iron,” and his main construction from the winter of 1960–61.
³⁹ See Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 24.
⁴⁰ Baker, “Oral History Interview with Robert Indiana”, 115.
⁴¹ Ibid.
⁴² Robert Indiana, quoted in Robert Indiana, 25.
⁴³ Baker, “Oral History Interview with Robert Indiana,” 115.
⁴⁴ Indiana, “Coenties Slip.”
⁴⁵ Robert Indiana, artist questionnaire on the work The Great American Dream, Whitney Museum of American Art, ca. 1977, quoted in “Artist’s Statements/Writings,” Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné.
⁴⁶ Indiana, “Coenties Slip.”
⁴⁷ Robert Indiana’s statement on the exhibition at the Stable Gallery, 1962, quoted in “Artist’s Statements/Writings.”
⁴⁸ Robert Indiana, artist questionnaire on the work The X-5, Whitney Museum of American Art, February 14, 1964, quoted in “Artist’s Statements/Writings.”
⁴⁹ Indiana: Artist’s statement on the work USA 666 (The Sixth American Dream). “666” was the brand name of a non-prescription cold medicine (originally intended for fever/malaria), and was advertised with small black and yellow metal signs on fences; the shaving cream Burma Shave famously advertised with series of street signs where each individual sign featured a line of a rhymed text and could be read sequentially from a car passing by. Indiana also linked the number “666” to Route 66, the Phillips-66 sign at his father’s gas station, and the month of his birth, June.
⁵⁰ Indiana, artist’s statement on the work EAT. The work was commissioned by Philip Johnson for the New York State Pavilion (Theaterama) at the New York World’s Fair 1964/65, alongside works by Ellsworth Kelly, Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg.
⁵¹ Indiana, Artist’s Questionnaire on the work LOVE Sculpture.
⁵² Robert Indiana on LOVE Sculpture. In: Art Now: New York 1 (March 1969); quoted in “Artist’s Statements/Writings,” Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné.
⁵³ For more on the monumental LOVE sculptures in public space, see Donald B. Goodall, “Introduction,” 16 f.
⁵⁴ On the warning that “love” is intended in a spiritual way and for more on Black and White LOVE (1968), dedicated to Martin Luther King, see ibid. 16.
⁵⁵ Mira Lapidot, quoted in Andrea Duffie, “What is LOVE?,” in Museumpalooza (Feb. 13, 2017), https://www.museumpalooza.com/blog/2017/2/11/what-is-love (viewed July 27, 2026).
⁵⁶ Goodall, “Introduction.”
⁵⁷ William James: The Will to Believe, 1897; quoted in: Goodall: “Introduction,” 8.
⁵⁸ Baker, “Oral History Interview with Robert Indiana,” 36.
⁵⁹ Ibid., 37.
⁶⁰ Ibid., 19.
⁶¹ Ibid., 20.
⁶² Ibid.
⁶³ Ibid.; on his preference for the individual word, see also Ibid., 13.
⁶⁴ Ibid., 4.
⁶⁵ Robert Indiana’s statement for the exhibition at the Stable Gallery, 1962, quoted in Elizabeth Botten, “Archives Reveal Touching Stories on the Life of Robert Indiana, the Man Who Invented ‘LOVE’” Smithsonian Magazine, May 30, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/robert-indiana-was-man-who-invented-love-180969201/(viewed July 8, 2026).
⁶⁶ Robert L. B. Tobin, “Robert Indiana,” in Robert Indiana, 19; see also William Katz, “Polychrome Polygonals,” ibid., 20.
⁶⁷ See Goodall, “Introduction,” 12.
⁶⁸ Simon Salama-Caro, “Chronology.”
⁶⁹ “Conversations with Robert Indiana,” 25 ff.
⁷⁰ Katz, “Polychrome Polygonals,” 20. Katz derives the triad geometry, identity, memory and the circle around it from the painting The Geography of the Memory, a compass rose that Indiana painted when he was a close neighbor of Agnes Martin over what was a county canvas (Brown County, Red County, Green County), and defines Indiana in essence as a formalist, geometer, and poet. He supports the autonomy of each visual element (in the essay: “thingness”) with a turn of phrase used by Indiana in a conversation from 1975 and with Donald Sutherland’s Epigraph in Robert Creeley, Presences: A Text for Marisol (New York: Scribner, 1976); see Gertrude Stein, What Are Masterpieces (Los Angeles: The Conference Press, 1940), and Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937).
⁷¹ Goodall, “Introduction,” 7 ff.
⁷² Indiana, artist’s questionnaire on the work Moon.