Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana was born Robert Earl Clark on September 13, 1928, in New Castle, Indiana — a state whose name he later adopted as his own. After serving in the United States Air Force and studying at several art schools, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Edinburgh College of Art, he settled in lower Manhattan in 1954. Working alongside artists including Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman in the Coenties Slip neighbourhood, he developed a distinctive hard-edged style that drew on American commercial signage, stencil lettering, and highway graphics.\n\nIndiana emerged on the national art scene in the early 1960s with works featuring bold, flat colours and short, declarative words — EAT, DIE, HUG, ERR — arranged in heraldic geometric formats. His LOVE image, first created as a card for the Museum of Modern Art's Christmas card in 1964, became one of the most reproduced artworks of the twentieth century: a simple stacking of four letters with the tilted O that has appeared as sculptures, posters, stamps, and jewellery around the world. Despite its ubiquity, Indiana received little financial benefit from the widely unauthorised reproductions.\n\nIn 1978 Indiana moved to the island of Vinalhaven, Maine, where he lived in near-seclusion for the last four decades of his life, continuing to paint and make sculpture. He died on May 19, 2018, on Vinalhaven. His estate became the subject of significant legal disputes over the authenticity of late works and his final years' circumstances.