Robert Indiana
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. 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.
If you own a work by Robert Indiana
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 costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.