Beyond ‘Love,’ The Enduring Legacy Of Robert Indiana Resonates Deeply Through Pace Gallery Representation

Throughout his presidency, John F. Kennedy averaged a 70.1% approval rating, handily the highest of any post-World War II U.S. president. While his alleged mistresses and lovers included movie stars Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich, White House intern Marion Fay “Mimi” Alford (née Beardsley), Judith Exner (who also claimed to be the paramour of Chicago Outfit boss Sam Giancana and mobster John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli), American painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, Swedish aristocrat Gunilla von Post, and Pamela Turnure (the first first Press Secretary hired to serve a U.S. First Lady), Kennedy only married once.

More than six decades later, the country is led by a man who has been married three times and divorced twice, with the most dismal 100-day job approval rating of any president in the past 80 years.

Robert Indiana was exposing the sanctimony of a system where leaders are held to higher standards than the people they serve, with his cutting critique in A Divorced Man Has Never Been the President (1961-1962). A preeminent figure in American art since that time, Indiana was directly referencing Nelson Rockefeller, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, 1964, and 1968, losing the party’s favor after he divorced his first wife Mary Todhunter Clark ​ in 1962 and married ​ Margaretta Large Fitler (A.K.A. Happy) a year later.

A blue star in the center is flanked between each point by five green circles emblazoned with “US” in blue, signifying the infusion of envy and greed into the colors of the American flag. The composition, featuring a circle emblazoned with text above stenciled letters expressing the title, recurs in Indiana’s paintings from the early 1960s. In this work, Indiana eschews the periods in the abbreviation so that “US” can be dually interpreted as the collective inhabitants and the country itself.

In 1961-1962, the U.S. political climate was icy, amid escalating strife with the Soviet Union, but there was a warmth emanating from the burgeoning counterculture movement. Sadly, today’s political revolt is divorced from the cultural and artistic values that define and empower humanity.

The timing is uncannily ripe for Robert Indiana: The American Dream, a major exhibition at the New York flagship of Pace Gallery, showcasing pristine examples of paintings and sculpture created from the early 1960s and evolving over decades. The groundbreaking presentation opens Friday at the 540 West 25th Street gallery and remains on view until August 15.

“In our world, what’s urgent is that really great artists have a tendency sometimes to disappear and to be rediscovered. It’s always great to rediscover an artist, especially one who has such vast influence,” Pace CEO Marc Glimcher said in a phone interview.

Indiana’s oeuvre is “deeply embedded in the context of his entire contribution to art and to Pop Art, which was enormous,” Glimcher continued. “If we just look at all the artists using words and language to make their art today, and 10 years ago. and 20 years ago, we can see how much influence Robert Indiana had.”

This essential exhibition examines Indiana’s inquiry into the duality of the American Dream, highlighting the connections between the artist’s personal history and the social, political, and cultural nuances of postwar America.

“It’s a treasure trove of work from the 60s, 70s, 80s, works we don’t see that often. By this stage, there’s only kind of late work left, usually when you start working with an artist like this. So we just have the capacity to show in the gallery a bunch of real masterworks, but we obviously got amazing loans from museums as well,” said Glimcher, who recalls meeting Indiana as a child.

Indiana abandoned New York for Vinalhaven, Maine, in 1978, where he lived in the Star of Hope, a Victorian building that had previously served as an Odd Fellows Lodge. His departure from the New York art world was partially entangled in lawsuits, and Pace was indispensable in his profound rediscovery.

The CEO’s father, Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery, included Indiana’s work in a seminal 1962 group exhibition, Stock Up for the Holidays. Last year, Pace announced its global representation of The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, the primary organization advocating for the artist’s achievement and maintaining a collection and archive of his extensive breadth of work. A pioneer who continues to influence generations of artists, Indiana utilized letters and numerals in his brazen sculptures, paintings, and prints, delving deep into American identity and iconography, and amplifying the power of abstraction. Indiana called himself an “American painter of signs,” developing a singular graphic visual lexicon that transformed American art. Pace now champions Indiana as a luminary in the global art world.

For many casual observers, Indiana is synonymous with his ubiquitous, quintessential LOVE sculptures with a slanted “O”. The first iteration of the work in Cor-Ten steel was created in 1970, and acquired by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. With more than 50 LOVE sculptures around the world, there is often a lack of philosophical inquiry and the lazy temptation to take a monumental word at face value, especially in an Instagram age. Indiana was openly gay, though he didn’t publicly display his sexuality. Instead, his art, particularly LOVE, was intertwined in his personal experiences and his romantic relationship with painter, sculptor, and printmaker Ellsworth Kelly.

“We started last year, when we had an exhibition called The Sweet Mystery, which was presented in Venice. We started with this sort of entry point into Indiana’s world, arising in New York. One of the main aspects that we are trying to do as we are building upon the legacy of this great American artist is to introduce his storytelling. This idea of where his name comes from, where he came from, how he arrived to where he became a great American figure having created quite possibly, one of the most iconic works,” said Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative Managing Director Emeline Salama-Caro, who investigates “what’s behind him as an artist, what he’s trying to convey. One of the most significant themes in his work, obviously, is that of the American Dream, which is an autobiographical reflection, but also profound commentary on the American Dream itself, both the optimism and the aspirations, but also the challenges and the contradictions. I think that, given today’s social-political landscape, these things are more relevant than ever.”

Salama-Caro continued: “What we’re trying to do with this exhibition in New York, and all the exhibitions that we are thinking of, is to expand to a new generation, to engage with Indiana’s poignant reflections of being an artist who’s so connected with his identity to America. This is a person who was an extremely cerebral human being. This is someone who’s very introspective, yet he came from the Midwest … It is very well documented about his life and being an adopted child and sort of not feeling that he was really part of this family, and all the difficulties and psychological traumas that came with that. But if you learn a little bit about him, he was a valedictorian, he was part of the Latin society. Poetry is something that’s so important to him. He was able to travel outside of America. But he came back and realized that, for him, the landscape, the history, the geography (of America) is so integral to his work, and yet he’s presenting it in a way, a style, that is so different to what we’re seeing out of the postwar period. You’ve got this moment of Abstract Expressionism. There’s a lot of gesture, there’s all these layers, and as you start to unpack that, it’s the story, it’s the narrative which makes Indiana’s work very interesting, and it can be related to so many different things that we’re feeling today.”

Born in 1928 as Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, some 44 miles east-northeast of Indianapolis, the artist proclaimed himself an “American painter of signs” and his legacy positions him as a towering figure in art history. His career celebration comes full circle with a return to Pace, which unravels the verisimilitude of his persona and outlook on life, embracing the deep emotions behind his multi-faceted art.

“Everybody knows that the gestalt of the Abstract Expressionists was so intense and their lives showed it. And there’s a (misconception) that these Pop Artists were having fun and being clever and not showing their soul. And that is not true. And that is especially not true for Robert Indiana,” said Marc Glimcher. “His portrayal of the American Dream (embodies) all of his personal hope and torment, a very complex personal story, and this is true for all of those artists. This was still them spilling their guts.”