拍品专文
“I am an American painter of signs charting the course. I would be a people's painter as well as a painter's painter.”
Robert Indiana
A striking example of Robert Indiana’s signs, 8 (1962) bursts with dazzling vigor in its crisp geometry and evocative imagery of an all-American, football-jersey simplicity. Deriving his visual vocabulary from the hard-edge advertising, logos and insignia of the military that comprise so much of the modern world’s iconography, Indiana’s sign explodes with consciousness of American values, along with the artist’s own aspirations for himself and his country.
An admirer of early-twentieth century American modernism, Indiana often reflected on the questions of national identity posed by artists such as Charles Demuth, Edward Hopper and Marsden Hartley. Indiana's fascination with numbers was evident early on in his career, in the numbers he stenciled on his constructions and progressively in the sequences of the Dream series. "Personal recollections, passages of time, living and dying, all the moments of the artist's life are translated into numbers” (M. Dibner, Indiana's Indianas: A 20-year Retrospective of Paintings and Sculpture From the Collection of Robert Indiana, exh. cat., Rockland, William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, 1982, p. 7). Drawing inspiration from the road signs and images seen as a child, Indiana's signs are autobiographical markers. During his youth, his peripatetic mother would constantly move home from home, and city to city. The house numbers that therefore trailed through Indiana's personal history became integral to his spiritual and emotional reaction to the numbers themselves. The digits that appear in his paintings are filled with purpose; they are the very building blocks of today’s existence, in terms of the numerical organization of daily facets of life—apartment blocks, building floors, telephone numbers, bus routes—and also in terms of the more arcane aspects of numerology that fascinated the artist. Indiana's juvenile interest in counting has transformed into a more mature interest in seriality, particularly evident within Indiana's number paintings. Thus the bold emblazoned numeral 8 here is a landmark—a multi-layered, modern symbol replacing the allegories and personification that filled the iconographies of old.
Though he has often been discussed in context with the lineage of number-writers, including Demuth and Jasper Johns, Indiana fits well into the generation of American Pop artists too. Deceptively simple, Indiana’s use of the familiar, ordinary and industrial is layered with references from art history and contemporary culture. However, where his contemporaries took numbers as a subject specifically for their lack of meaning, for their mathematic precision and arbitrary appearance in the context of art, Indiana selected them precisely for their richness of meaning. His numbers become outward meaning-makers that reveal his own view of America—a landscape crafted through his trademark style. It is the endemic nature of the numerals in contemporary life, and the democratic interest in the theme that this implies, that prompted Indiana to celebrate these signs in works such as the bold, energetic 8.