Farewell to Robert Indiana, the father of the celebrated LOVE

One of the fathers of Pop Art, Robert Indiana, has passed away at the age of 89. The great artist left us on Saturday from respiratory arrest, but the news was not released until the past few hours. At the time of his death Robert Indiana was at his home in Vinalhaven, Maine, northern United States. Born Robert Clark in 1928 in New Castle, in the state of Indiana (hence the stage name by which he is universally known), he had become famous for sculptures that reproduced short inscriptions such as EAT, HOPE, DIE and especially LOVE (with the letters arranged in a square and the “O” folded at an angle), his most famous work. An iconic work of twentieth-century art, it was created in 1964 for a MoMA postcard in New York, and then became so popular that it was replicated in multiple versions, in the United States but also around the world, and even in other languages. It is also one of the works that has experienced the most attempts at plagiarism.

Interested in American culture in all its aspects, on a par with Andy Warhol (with whom he collaborated on the film Eat, which for 45 minutes captures Indiana eating a mushroom), Indiana had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and, with a stint in Scotland, the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art. Returning to the U.S. in 1954, he settled in New York where he began working, as an artist but also as a costume and set designer for the theater, and exhibited his first monograph in 1962. Since then he has exhibited all over the world, also participating in several international exhibitions, such as the fourth Documenta in Kassel (in 1968) and the third Sculpture Biennale in Monte Carlo (1991). In 2013, the Whitney Museum in New York had dedicated a major career-long retrospective to him, entitled Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE.

Farewell to Robert Indiana, the father of the celebrated LOVE

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