Susan Elizabeth Ryan – Robert Indiana: Insurgent Formalist

“Toys by Artists”, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York 1964
Includes works by Robert Indiana, Lyonel Feininger, Alexander Calder, Dan Basen,
Andy Warhol and Agnes Martin
In a 1974 interview the artist said, “It’s always been a matter of impact, the relationship of color to color and word to shape and word to
complete piece — both the literal and visual aspects. I’m most concerned with the force of its impact.” 11 His verbal-visual paintings go beyond
color, flat surface, and precise execution, the aspects of formalist theory at which he excels and writers like Greenberg appreciated. Indiana
also deploys dynamics that the critics of his day missed. He activates our eyes as optical relays engaging the creative and linguistic capabilities
of vision: how impulses volley between the retina and the brain — optics and ideas reverberate — and remind us of how we all construct our
own self-images.
Susan Elizabeth Ryan
1
Postcard to the author, 2 October 1991.
2
The U.S. Postal Service commissioned a stamp in 1972, based on his LOVE paintings.
3
Haskell, “Robert Indiana: The American Dream,” in Robert Indiana: Beyond Love (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014), 99.
4
Indiana called his work “verbal-visual” in 1963: Richard Brown Baker (“Taped Interview with Robert Indiana (October-November 1963),” transcript (Robert Indiana Collection,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Washington, D. C.), 30. See also Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press),
Chap. 4.
5
After ancient stone columns (hermae) with heads and phalluses that served as road and boundary markers commemorating the Greek god Hermes who was, among other
things, the protector of travelers.
6
Indiana, telephone interview with author 20 February 1992, and Richard Brown Baker “Taped Interview,” 28. Indiana says he read about the ship Rebecca in American Heritage
magazine. See further Ryan, Robert Indiana, 142 and 284 n. 50.
7
Ryan, Robert Indiana, 122 and 164ff.
8
See Ryan, Robert Indiana, 199. However Indiana has associated the circle with many things including Indiana Circle in Indianapolis, and Gertrude Stein’s word circle, “A rose is a
rose.”
9
Ryan, Robert Indiana, 163.
10
Ryan, Robert Indiana, 201. Rather than the Christian Science church’s ubiquitous “God is Love” Indiana painted “Love is God.”
11
Phyllis Tuchman, “Pop! Interviews with George Segal, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Robert Indiana,” Art News 73 (May, 1974), 29.
11