Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art
Marietta, GA
770-528-1444
Robert Indiana: Love and the American Dream
The Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art will present the exhibition "Robert Indiana: Love and the American Dream" from Tuesday, November 23, 1999 through Sunday, January 30, 2000.
The
Robert Indiana major retrospective features sixty works in painting, sculpture,
and graphics, including the signature icon image "L O V E" postage
stamp series. A curious and coincidental connection exists between the "LOVE"
U. S. postage stamp and the Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art building which first
opened in 1909 as the United States Post Office serving Cobb County for
63 years. (left: LOVE, USPS stamp, 1976-77)
One of the major "Pop" artists, the Indiana exhibition presents the two major themes of his career - the American Dream and Love - which engage many different facets of American life during the 20th century. These concepts are parallel yet separate, intertwined yet engaged with a search for cultural and personal identity.
Featured
in the exhibition are Indiana's Beware-Danger American Dream No. 4
(1963) oil on canvas and LOVE(1967) aluminum sculpture on loan from
the Hirshhorn Museum and The Figure Five (1963) oil on canvas from
the National Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution. (left:
The Figure Five ,1963)
"For a number of years I had hoped to organize a major
Indiana retrospective," 
explained director Alexander Gaudieri. "When
I arrived here last January, one of the first calls I made was to Robert
Indiana to explore this possibility. He told me that the Portland (Maine)
Museum of Art was already organizing such an exhibition. I immediately phoned
the director of the Portland Museum, Daniel P. O'Leary, to inquire about
our having the exhibition here. It all worked out and here we are!"
(right: Beware-Danger American Dream No. 4, 1963)
The
American Dream has both positive and negative sides - a chance of self-improvement
or an empty promise of riches. The image of Love, created by Indiana in
the mid-1960s, has been seen alternatively as counter-culture and as mainstream,
idealistic and commercial, high art and low culture, a symbol of power and
of folly. This exhibition brings Robert Indiana's icons and ideas into focus,
uniting concepts that have preoccupied the self-designated "people's
painter" and "American painter of signs" for decades.
(left: American Love, 1968)
"This
exhibition has already had major repercussions in the art world nationally,"
director Gaudieri continued. "Two substantial articles on Indiana have
appeared in The New York Times. The Whitney Museum of American Art
is featuring LOVE (1966) as one of its signature paintings in its
current 20th-century retrospective exhibition "The American Century
Part II 1950 - 2000." This is one of the most significant endeavors
that our museum has ever undertaken. We are delighted that the exhibition
has been sponsored by the Anncox Foundation, Inc. with additional support
from Moore, Ingram, Johnson and Steele." (right: Sweet Mystery,
1960-61)
Now
making his home in Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine, Robert
Indiana, in his life and his art, has come full circle. Robert Indiana is
the paragon of the Dream. And the question remains: Who determines the validity
or failure of the Dream? Alfred H. Barr, the late founding director of the
Museum of Modern Art, called The American Dream "spellbinding."
"I do not know why I like it so much," he said. Indiana himself
points out that the real impact lies exactly in the interplay between strong,
even disparate, visual - verbal qualities. (left: LOVE, sculpture)
Read more about the Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art in the Resource Library
rev. 11/22/10
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