Exhibit of the week: Robert Indiana: Beyond Love

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

Through Jan. 5

The career of “one of the most celebrated pop artists of the 1960s” was hijacked by a single word, said Kathryn Tully in Forbes.com. Robert Indiana was already winning acclaim for his bold geometric prints when, in 1965, the Museum of Modern Art asked him to design a Christmas card for its gift shop. He produced an iconic image: the word “love” spelled out in capital letters and arranged in two lines with the “O” tilting suggestively rightward. The fame that Love brought Indiana came at a steep price, said Eileen Kinsella in Art + Auction. Since the design was never copyrighted, a storm of unauthorized reproductions followed. The image’s ubiquity led critics to dismiss Indiana as a one-hit wonder. Now, however, the 85-year-old artist’s long career is finally getting serious attention.

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He’s certainly overdue for a revisit, said Ted Loos in Vogue.com. The Whitney exhibition, which incorporates five decades of work, is the first major American retrospective for an artist who helped define the style of the 1960s and whose use of text helped pave the way for conceptualism. Surprisingly, much of Indiana’s work is “deeply autobiographical,” said Jesse McKinley in The New York Times. Born in 1928 and adopted as an infant, he spent much of his early life on the road. His 1964–66 series “Exploding Numbers” was a product of living at 21 different addresses by the time he was 19. And while “no single word has meant more to Indiana’s career than Love,” a word piece from 1962 has greater personal significance. Eat/Die, a set of two sign-like panels, is an homage to his mother, who worked as a waitress at several diners. On her deathbed, her last words to her son were, “Have you had enough to eat?”

Indiana’s paintings are “terrifically punchy, both graphically and semantically,” said Ken Johnson, also in the Times. Painted between 1964 and 1966, USA 666, the 6th American Dream contains five black-and-yellow squares arranged in an X shape to look like a train crossing sign. “Its textual components add to its alarming impact,” and while the work isn’t overtly political, it “prophetically embodies the apocalyptic feeling looming over the United States in that decade of sociopolitical and spiritual tumult.” Indiana’s totem-like sculptures, while less arresting, hold a different kind of significance. Indiana called these objects “herms” and based them on Greek and Roman tributes to the god Hermes, who was said to serve as an intermediary between gods and mortals. Likewise, Indiana’s works “are gateways between the visual and the verbal, the private and the public, the physical and the metaphysical, and the conscious and the unconscious.” They are also “ravishing to behold.”