Robert Indiana valuation
Made LOVE, lost control of it, and spent his last decades alone on an island in Maine.
Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana in 1928 and took the name of his state.
What a work by Robert Indiana is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana in 1928 and took the name of his state. Working in Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan alongside Kelly, Martin and Youngerman, he made hard-edged paintings from stencilled words and numbers drawn from commercial signage and from American literature. LOVE, with its tilted O, was designed as a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card in 1965; because the image was not adequately copyrighted it was reproduced worldwide without payment, and Indiana always felt it had eclipsed everything else he did. He moved to Vinalhaven, Maine in 1978 and died there in 2018.
LOVE and the later HOPE exist in an unusually complicated field of authorised sculptures, licensed editions, unauthorised reproductions and disputed late works, and litigation following the artist's death concerned exactly that. Anything offered as a LOVE sculpture requires careful documentation of edition, fabricator and authorisation. The earlier hard-edged canvases and the herm sculptures made from found timber are the scholarly heart of the work and are scarce. Screenprints and portfolios from the 1960s and 1970s are well catalogued and are the most straightforward part of the market.
At a glance
- Born
- 13 September 1928, New Castle
- Died
- 19 May 2018, Vinalhaven
- Movements
- Pop art, Hard-Edge Painting
More on Wikipedia.
Coenties Slip, EAT and the Star of Hope
Indiana studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1949 to 1953, at Skowhegan and at Edinburgh College of Art, and settled in New York in 1954. Ellsworth Kelly, his partner, found him a loft on Coenties Slip, where his neighbours included Jack Youngerman, Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly. He took the name Indiana in 1958, and Alfred H. Barr Jr. bought The American Dream, I for the Museum of Modern Art.
Philip Johnson commissioned an EAT sign for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair; it was switched off a day after the fair opened. In 1969 he began renting the Star of Hope, a former Odd Fellows hall on Vinalhaven, and moved there for good in 1978. He also designed the sets and costumes for Virgil Thomson's opera The Mother of Us All.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
