Robert Indiana: Red, White & Blue American Icon

June 12, 2013/Robin Rile

“HOPE”. Such a simple message, but imbued with so much more. American icon Robert Indiana (b. 1928) has made a lifetime of providing us with small words with a big impact. Driven from his career in commercial design, he recognized early on that a simple word could stand out and be noticed more than more complex terminologies. His “LOVE” transcended Hippie culture, to be one of the most important and indelible images of 20th Century Art.

While his Pop imagery is often jarring, it also is a quintessential part of what it means to be American. Short, simple terms such as EAT, LOVE, HOPE, DIE and HUG are portrayed in all Capital letters in a formal typeface with bold colors and looming scale. Natural Arabic Numerals from 0-9 contrast simple backgrounds and subtle contact telling you information you already knew. In a very real sense, the works bring the viewer back to their youth, learning integers, prime numbers and fractions in primary school.

Indiana’s works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Brandeis Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; and the Los Angeles County Museum, California, among many others.

As the 4th of July approaches we are inundated with images of the Red/White & Blue. These colors are primary (as are often the digits which Indiana adorns with them) and thereby create a physiological response of the human eye which has no equal in secondary color spectrum. The colors MAKE you notice them. Hence this is why they are used in as many flags as they are. Indiana employs them as bold, brash and focused entities…. Not unlike the rest of us Americans.