Robert Indiana

"Indianapolis Museum of Art Inaugural Exhibitions", Color Silkscreen, Signed

1970

Victor Vasarely born in 1906 was a Hungarian-French artist, who is widely accepted as a "grandfather" and leader of the Op Art movement. Op Art is a form of abstract art that gives the illusion of movement by the precise use of pattern and color, or in which conflicting patterns emerge and overlap. Victor Vasarely and Brigit Riley are its most famous exponents. In its visual balancing act of color and movement from a flat plane to developed continuous flow “Untitled” is a complex arrangement of squares and colors that visually expand and contract. It is one of Vasarely’s most successful Op Art abstract works. The piece is signed on the lower right and number 20/150 on the lower left. The print is behind glass and matted. Vasarely was born in Pecs and grew up in Slovakia and Budapest, where in 1925, he took up medical studies. Abandoning medicine he turned to traditional academic painting at the private Podolini-Volkmann Academy. In 1928/1929, he enrolled at Sandor Bortnyik’s private art school widely recognized as Budapest's centre of Bauhaus studies. His studies concentrated on applied graphic art and typographical design. In 1929, he painted his Blue Study and Green Study. In 1930, he married his fellow student Claire Spinner (1908–1990). Together they had two sons, Andre and Jean-Pierre. Vasarely became a graphic designer and a poster artist during the 1930s combining patterns and organic images with each other. Vasarely utilized geometric shapes and colorful graphics, the artist created compelling illusions of spatial depth, as seen in his work Vega-Nor (1969). Vasarely’s method of painting borrowed from a range of influences, including Bauhaus design principles, Wassily Kandinsky, and Constructivism. In the late 1920s, Vasarely enrolled at the Muhely Academy in Budapest, where the syllabus was largely based on Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus school in Germany. After settling in Paris in 1930, Vasarely worked in advertising agencies to support himself as a graphic artist while creating many works including Zebra (1937), which is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op Art. The artist experimented in a style based in Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s, before arriving at his hallmark checkerboard...

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY Soft pastel colors in floating smudges lay between and around lyrical abstract geometric and organic forms giving a diaphanous color and shape harmony to the work...

Artist: Robert Indiana, American (1928 - 2018) Title: Indianapolis Museum of Art Year: 1970 Medium: Silkscreen Poster Size: 35 x 25 in. (88.9 x 63.5 cm)

Artist: Robert Indiana (American, born 1928) Title: "Indiana Eliott" Year: 1977 Medium: Original color lithograph Edition: Numbered 32/150 in pencil Paper: Arches Image size: 18 x 14 inches paper size: 23.65 x 19.5 inches Signature: Hand signed in pencil by the artist Publisher: Leon Amiel, New York Printer: Fernand Mourlot, Paris Condition: It is in excellent condition, has never been framed. Description: From the suite "The Mother of All Us" About the artist: Robert Indiana was born in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928. His family name was Clark but he adopted the name of his native state early in his career. His father worked for a Phillips 66 gas station and his mother ran a diner. He began his studies in art in 1945 at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and then at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New York. He then moved to Chicago and continued his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also studied at the Skowhgan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, the Edinburgh College of Art and London University, eventually moving to New York City in 1956. A major Pop Artist, his work is characterized by the use of words and relatively flat paint with no brush strokes. This cold and somewhat mechanical approach to painting in which the words are often stenciled into the design probably was influenced by street signs, pinball machines, the commercial stenciling process used in printing and advertisements. In fact, Indiana calls himself "a painter of signs". He uses the common everyday symbols and words of America and paints them as brilliantly colored pop art paintings. His work comments in an ironic fashion on American life and culture, often making pointed political statements about American society. The words in his painting are usually simple and short words, sometimes with clear meaning and other times arranged in an ambiguous fashion to project multiple meanings, and occasionally involve puns. It is interesting to try to put his "words" together to get a sense of the meaning. For instance, in The Triumph of Tira, painted in, 1960-61, the artist presents four circles with four squares inside them and four stars inside the squares. There is one word in each star. The upper left says "Law"; the upper right says "Cat"; the lower left says "Men"; and the lower right says "Sex." Of course it is hard to understand the relationship between the words, and as you begin to speculate on what it might mean, a number of possible interpretations evolve. Other works have more obvious meanings, sometimes political. One painting shows an outline of the State of Alabama with Selma marked in the right location. The words "Just as in the anatomy of man, every nation must have its hind part", are stenciled around the map. This is a reference to the march on Selma, which was an important event in the Civil Rights Movement during the 60's. Indiana's most famous painting is of the word "Love". It is painted with the LO on the top and VE on the bottom. This painting was used as a design for an American postage stamp...