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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by Simon Salama-Caro.
Created on the cusp of the Pop and Minimalist movement, the sculpture ART was originally presented in the form of a poster commissioned by Sam Hunter, an art critic and historian at Princeton University. The poster was initially used for the show American Art Since 1960, which took place at the University's Museum of Art. A true testament to the hard-edge quality explored previously by Indiana, the poster became the inspiration for the ART paintings. These paintings integrated red, white and blue, which are significant to Indiana, for their purity and association with the American flag. It is important to note his fond affection for the American colors as Robert Indiana is above all an American painter of American signs.
Through his exploration and attempt to answer the questions surrounding the assessment of art as physical object, Indiana followed in a similar logic to his earlier piece the LOVE by taking the ART paintings one step further into a three-dimensional sculptural form. His "drawing in space," as it was referred to by Indiana, contrasted significantly to the solidity of the LOVE and NUMBERS sculptures and much of the other work created at the time by his Minimalist peers. With an ephemeral quality the thin sheets of polychrome aluminum employed in his ART sculpture "brought the fine-edged concept into the third dimension. With an appearance that seemed weightless, its slender outlines and shimmering skin, radiated color into the air, around and within." (C. J. Weinhardt Jr, Robert Indiana, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1990, p. 200) Bringing to life another part of American speech, Indiana wonderfully magnifies what Roland Barthes observed in Pop art as "the attempt to abolish the Signified" (Ryan, Susan. Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech. Yale University Press: London and New Haven, 2000, p. 112).
Created on the cusp of the Pop and Minimalist movement, the sculpture ART was originally presented in the form of a poster commissioned by Sam Hunter, an art critic and historian at Princeton University. The poster was initially used for the show American Art Since 1960, which took place at the University's Museum of Art. A true testament to the hard-edge quality explored previously by Indiana, the poster became the inspiration for the ART paintings. These paintings integrated red, white and blue, which are significant to Indiana, for their purity and association with the American flag. It is important to note his fond affection for the American colors as Robert Indiana is above all an American painter of American signs.
Through his exploration and attempt to answer the questions surrounding the assessment of art as physical object, Indiana followed in a similar logic to his earlier piece the LOVE by taking the ART paintings one step further into a three-dimensional sculptural form. His "drawing in space," as it was referred to by Indiana, contrasted significantly to the solidity of the LOVE and NUMBERS sculptures and much of the other work created at the time by his Minimalist peers. With an ephemeral quality the thin sheets of polychrome aluminum employed in his ART sculpture "brought the fine-edged concept into the third dimension. With an appearance that seemed weightless, its slender outlines and shimmering skin, radiated color into the air, around and within." (C. J. Weinhardt Jr, Robert Indiana, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1990, p. 200) Bringing to life another part of American speech, Indiana wonderfully magnifies what Roland Barthes observed in Pop art as "the attempt to abolish the Signified" (Ryan, Susan. Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech. Yale University Press: London and New Haven, 2000, p. 112).