Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana, born Robert Clark, is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. His "LOVE" print, first created for the Museum of Modern Art's Christmas card in 1965, was the basis for the widely distributed 1973 United States Postal Service "LOVE" stamp. His media include paperand Cor-ten steel sculpture...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPop Artist
Date of Birth13 September 1928
CityNew Castle, IN
CountryUnited States of America
I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old
I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.
Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.
I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many.
I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.
Love is a dangerous commodity-fraught with peril,
Pop art is the American Dream, optimistic, generous, and naive!
Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees.
My goal is that LOVE should cover the world.
I had no idea LOVE would catch on the way it did. Oddly enough, I wasn't thinking at all about anticipating the Love generation and hippies. It was a spiritual concept. It isn't a sculpture of love any longer. It's become the very theme of love itself.
Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades...It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop...
I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.