Art: Commanding Painter

To some painters these days, the highest ideal is impersonality. They do not sign their works. They are not interested in painting out their mental turmoil on canvas, as were abstract expressionists. One such artist in search of anonymity is Robert Indiana, 36, who adopted that surname from his native state rather than endure the pangs of his actual identity.

Nonetheless, last week the young Hoosier was getting quite a name for himself. On the side of the New York State Pavilion at the World’s Fair is an Indiana “mural” made up of the letters E, A and T in a crisscross, which draws an occasional visitor in search of hot dogs or pizza. It is supposed to flash on and off with hundreds of lights, but every time the fair people plug it in, it blows its own fuse. His poster for the opening of the ballet theater hangs in Lincoln Center. A show of recent work opened at Manhattan’s Stable Gallery, and to top it off, somebody who obviously cared stole one of his paintings from another gallery.

ERR? Indiana is primarily known for his emblematic circles set in plane-geometry shapes like road signs. Their bright, unmixed colors are so unpainterly that his brush stroke cannot be detected, because, as he says, “impasto is visual indigestion.” Usually they are ringed with inscriptions: phrases from Melville and Whitman, or commands in broken stencil type such as EAT, HUG, LOVE, DIE, or ERR. These curt verbs, he believes, represent the vocabulary of the American dream, the “optimistic, generous, and naive” philosophy of plenty that is often mistaken for all the philosophy that the U.S. lives by.

Though Pop artists shun identifying the social satire in their work, Indiana admits that he thinks “it is pretty hard to swallow the whole thing about the American dream. It started from the day the Pilgrims landed, the dream, the idea that Americans have more to eat than anyone else. But I remember going to bed without enough to eat.”

YIELD? Indiana spent nine years studying art, right through a fellowship to the University of Edinburgh. Nevertheless, he believes that art should not demand head-scratching analysis. His esthetic is frankly skin-deep, but “its comprehension can be as immediate as a crucifixion.” So can his emblems, during these times of integration struggles, that proclaim YIELD BROTHER. His newest work, a diptych called A Mother Is a Mother and A Father Is a Father, returns to the figure, shows a barefoot man in hat and overcoat and a disheveled, barebreasted, scarlet-coated woman, each getting out of a Model T Ford. The figures are Indiana’s parents, and the license-plate date is the year before his birth. “I have a notion that I was conceived in the back seat of a tin lizzie,” Indiana explains.

Indiana’s ancestors in hard-edge imagery are Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and other U.S. precisionists; the lettering is akin to Stuart Davis. His waterfront studio overlooks the Brooklyn Bridge, and among his recent works are images that recall Joseph Stella’s adoration of the bridge in paint. But Indiana circles them with poetry from Hart Crane, as he circles salvaged sailing-ship masts in his show with staccato words. Commanding, yes, but the weakness of his work is that the wordiness relates more to literature than painting, and the forms more to highly repetitive geometry than art.