Robert Indiana was born in Newcastle, Indiana. As an adult he adopted the name of the state for his "nom de brush" -- his original surname was Clark. He served for three years in the Air Force during World War Il and went to the Art Institute of Chicago on the G.I. Bill from 1949 to 1953. A traveling fellowship sent him overseas to the University of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh College of Art, where he studied typography among other things. Returning to the United States at the end of 1954 he rented a studio in New York with the help of Ellsworth Kelly. His subsequent work showed the influence of Kelly's hard-edged graphic minimalism. He also worked in assemblage, and his first large-scale success was an inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's 1961 group show, The Art of Assemblage. Signs, he acknowledged, had made an impact on him. His childhood had been "haunted" by an illuminated Phillips 66 sign over the place where his father worked: "the one most fascinating visual object in my entire youth." His mother had been employed at roadside diners, which was an inspiration when the New York World's Fair commissioned him to produce a work for display in 1964 and he made Eat. "I have always been impressed how with a little concentration and a little mental exercise, if one concentrates long enough on a word or figure, it's very easy to lose the conscious grasp of what that is, and one can look at a word, and after concentrating on it for a little while, one has almost forgotten what that word is," he told an interviewer in 1963. "And I should like in a way this to be a part of my work, too." Literary quotations appeared in his early pieces, then the words became simple and terse. His 1965 Love has been widely reproduced. In 1964 Andy Warhol filmed him consuming a mushroom but he came to feel rejected by the art culture of New York. The commercial dissemination of Love affected his reputation as a serious artist without bringing in a commensurate degree of monetary remuneration. "The image has been endlessly ripped off," he told the New York Times. "I'm not a tortured artist, just an abused one." The Whitney Museum will open a major retrospective of his work in late 2013.
