'I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists," Robert Indiana once said. That's probably why, so far, he's finished just out of the running for a medal in the field. ( Andy Warhol, of course, got the gold, Roy Lichtenstein the silver and Claes Oldenburg the bronze.) The problem seems to be that Mr. Indiana—who was born in 1928 and changed his surname in 1958 from Clark to that of his home state—was an anomalously sincere Pop artist. Unlike the ethereally ironic Warhol, the deadpan faux-comic-book Lichtenstein or the facilely absurd gigantist Oldenburg, Mr. Indiana meant absolutely every word he ever stenciled onto a canvas or one of his early totemic sculptures....
Surely the image above of an art object of Indiana's is a forerunner of his 'love' image, which he first published as a Christmas card for MoMA in 1964. The love image is now wide spread and I applaud this:
Robert Indiana is himself part of another art image, a photo by William John Kennedy. taken in 1963. The setting is Indiana's studio in New York City.
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