Robert Indiana Art

Robert Indiana’s message of HOPE has been an important, poetic language spanning his long career. The Four Seasons of HOPE was created for his solo exhibition at the historic Four Se...

Robert Indiana’s message of HOPE has been an important, poetic language spanning his long career. The Four Seasons of HOPE was created for his solo exhibition at the historic Four Se...

This exquisite silkscreen by Robert Indiana (1928–2018), titled Eternal Hexagon, originates from the landmark 1964 folio X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters). Published by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, and printed by Sirocco Screenprints, Inc., North Haven, in Eternal Hexagon, Indiana channels the crisp geometry, hard-edged clarity, and bold typographic immediacy that define his mature style, merging symbolic abstraction with a visual language rooted in American signage, industrial aesthetics, and modernist form. Executed as a silkscreen on Mohawk Superfine Bristol paper, this work measures 20 x 24 inches. Unsigned and unnumbered as issued. Printed by Sirocco Screenprints, Inc., North Haven, one of the most capable American screenprinting ateliers of the mid-20th century. Artwork Details: Artist: Robert Indiana (1928–2018) Title: Eternal Hexagon, from X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters), 1964 Medium: Silkscreen on Mohawk Superfine Bristol paper Dimensions: 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96 cm) Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered as issued Date: 1964 Publisher: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford Printer: Sirocco Screenprints, Inc., North Haven Edition: D Catalogue raisonne reference: Sheehan, Susan, et al. Robert Indiana Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1951–1991. Susan Sheehan Gallery, 1991, No. 33. Condition: Well preserved, consistent with age and medium Provenance: From the 1964 folio X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters), published by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford Notes: Excerpted from the folio, This portfolio was commissioned and printed in an attempt to extend as much of the visual impact as possible of ten artists to paper and to make these prints available to collectors who might not otherwise have such a vivid slice of the artist. The dry surface of screening seemed to be most apt to translate the effect of their painting, both the flatness which is the unifying bond between the ten, and the insistance of paint on the surface of canvas so like the visible heft of ink on paper here. Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., Curator of Printings. About the Publication: X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters), published in 1964 by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, stands as one of the most ambitious and influential printmaking endeavors of postwar American art. Conceived under the direction of curator Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., the project sought to capture and translate the defining visual languages of ten leading American painters of the era—Stuart Davis, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Adolph Gottlieb, George Ortman, Larry Poons, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein—into original silkscreens. Each artwork was created as an autonomous work that embodied the formal, chromatic, and conceptual principles of its respective artist. The choice of silkscreen printing, executed by Sirocco Screenprints, Inc., was central to the portfolio’s purpose: its dry, matte surface and capacity for crisp, saturated color allowed for a faithful translation of the painters’ flatness, surface tension, optical effects, and graphic precision. Organized and published by a major American museum at a moment of seismic change in contemporary art, X + X marked a turning point in institutional engagement with editioned works, representing one of the first concerted efforts by a museum to commission an ensemble of original graphics from the leading figures of its time. The portfolio captured the pulse of 1960s American painting—from Hard-Edge abstraction to Pop, Op, and Color Field—offering both a curated snapshot of artistic innovation and an accessible format that expanded the audience for contemporary art. Today, X + X is widely regarded as a landmark in American printmaking, celebrated for its curatorial vision, technical accomplishment, and its role in defining the dialogue between museum patronage and the burgeoning print culture of the 1960s. About the Artist: Robert Indiana (1928–2018) was a pioneering American painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose bold fusion of text, color, and hard edged geometry helped define Pop Art and positioned him within a powerful lineage extending from Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, synthesizing the conceptual daring of early modernism with the visual immediacy of postwar American culture; emerging in 1960s New York as a leading voice of the Pop generation, Indiana transformed the language of commercial signage, roadside Americana, billboards, typography, and industrial stenciling into emotionally charged meditations on identity, patriotism, desire, labor, migration, and national mythology, and his seminal LOVE image first conceived in 1965 for the Museum of Modern Art’s Christmas card became one of the most influential and widely disseminated works of the 20th century, cementing his global legacy while his broader oeuvre explored political history, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and autobiographical narratives tied to his industrial Midwest upbringing; influenced by the structural clarity of Calder, the conceptual provocations of Duchamp, the spiritual abstraction of Kandinsky, the surreal wit of Miro, and the experimental boldness of Man Ray, Indiana moved alongside Pop and contemporary luminaries such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, and Tom Wesselmann, all while forging a distinct voice that elevated language into monumental sculpture and emotional architecture, shaping later generations of artists including Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, Glenn Ligon, Tracey Emin, and Martin Creed, and earning placement in the world’s foremost museums MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery of Art, LACMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, and others culminating in his highest auction record on May 15, 2019, when LOVE (Red/Blue) (1966–1999) sold for 4,112,000 USD at Christies New York. Robert Indiana silkscreen...