Over a dozen employees huddled like a soccer team inside the Casmin Gallery in Manhattan. It was late February, and gallery president Nick Olney had given his staff a Pep talk before the opening of Robert Indiana's first exhibition of works in New York since the artist's death in 2018. Goal: Reboot.
Most people know Robert Indiana in just one: Love. The image of that four-letter word is that its incredibly tilted “O” appears in urban squares, coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets around the world.
However, it is the burnt battle of Earth over his legacy that has riveted the world of art since his death.
Now, after the resolution of the major lawsuits, two previous parties have taken part in an unusual ceasefire in that battle, each represented by a separate Manhattan Gallery. They prove that the artist is neither a one-hit wonder nor a warning story. The stakes are high. The fuss of Indiana artwork, previously tied up by lawsuits, is worth tens of millions of dollars.
Kasmin's show will run until March 29th. On May 9th, Pace Gallery will be testing public appetite at the exhibition. It is rare to install the same artist, especially two galleries with curb appeal muted. To that end, both exhibitions aim to revive Indiana's inactive markets by bringing years of work from his early career into the light, presenting him as an important American artist whose contributions have never been fully understood. “He's an artist hiding right in front of him,” Olney said.
Gallery succeeds or fails based on the ability to make the artist feel relevant to a contemporary audience. But reintroducing Indiana is now a difficult task. With the art market in a recession, collectors are reluctant to compete for something other than fresh materials with some rising talent and true masterpieces by brand names.
“It's like a whole new artist, to showcase people who are not just sculptures, but especially those associated with one sculpture,” said art advisor Joshua Holden. “Does that change everything, or is it a useless attempt to breathe new life into a market that doesn't exist for good reason?”
How long does it take to restart?
Both galleries focus on Indiana works, particularly his paintings, and from the 1960s the success of the runaway “love” has led some in the world of art to dismiss him as a horny one-hit wonder. During that early period, Indiana blended the visual language of advertising, concrete poetry, and geometric abstraction to create what is called transcendental pop art.
However, the artist, who moved to Vienal Haven's remote Maine in 1978 to escape the pressure cooker of New York Art World, had an uneasy relationship with the art market and resisted the commercial show of his early work. “He essentially refused to release paintings,” said Simon Salama Caro, former artist agent and founder of the Robert Indiana Heritage Initiative.
Revenues from Casminshaw provide the cash inflows needed to his sole beneficiary. This provides the stars of the Hope Foundation, a nonprofit organization that Indiana supported the arts in Maine before his death and established before his death to create his vinal haven home. The art left behind by Indiana has been subject to a highly diverse range of assessments, and was estimated to be worth around $40 million in 2021, but is a major asset for the foundation.
“I really don't know what the real value is,” said Adam Weinberg, a board member of the foundation and former director of the Whitney Museum, who historically registered a retrospective of Indiana work in 2013. “This is the beginning of resetting the market, the public face of Indiana as an artist, and all relationships.”
Indiana is being sold to a new generation
Indiana does not fit comfortably into the narrative of Pop Art, an international art movement that brought advertising, comics and mass media to the high cultural realm. He was an indie ronner who wrote the poems and obsessed with reading Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and felt drawn to spirituality. (For two years, his day's work was for the iconic pastor at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, above Manhattan.)
His art was also more autobiographical than many of his fellow art. Kasmin's show includes “Mother and Father” (1963-66). This makes the Indiana mother, covered in a red cape with exposed breasts, and her father, under a trench coat, look pantless at first glance.
“It's hard to think of anything by other American artists, Oedipal, albeit mysteriously,” Ken Johnson wrote in a review of The New York Times of Whitney's retrospective in Indiana. (“Beyond Love” attempted “Beyond Love,” which attempted to do what the gallery is currently trying to do for the market for the sake of the market. Indiana's work was revived according to “Promotion in 2013, using words to explore the themes of American identity, racial injustice and illusions and disillusionment.”
Casmin's exhibition also documented young Indiana, seeking his own artistic voice, assimilating the work of his peers, especially his studio companions and ex-love, Ellsworth Kelly. Presented alongside the ovoid-shaped painting in Indiana in 1959, a diary in which he expresses his concern that the work “may be too “Kelly” for comfort.”
The packaging of both shows reveals much about what the gallery believes is necessary to sell today's artists to a new generation. Both Pace and Kasmin highlight the artist's progressive politics and his strange identity. Pace's exhibition includes the 1961 painting “The Calumet,” which includes names of various Native American tribes likened to contemporary land recognition by the gallery's leading curator, Oliver Schultz.
“It helps that he's not this image of a bar fight, that he's not a macho New York artist,” Olney said. “He was solidly anti-racist and stuffed his politics into his work. That's not what many artists had.”
An unusual alliance
The Indiana exhibition is designed to create a new start after a very expensive, very public legal battle for his work and legacy. “It's uncertainty that the market doesn't like,” said Marc Glimcher, PACE CEO. But two shows held in close succession in two galleries may disrupt his legacy. Exactly, who is in charge here?
This division comes from Indiana's decision in the 1990s, and in exchange for regular payments, he signs the for-profit company Morgan Art Foundation to the rights to his most famous works, including “Love.” In a 2018 lawsuit, Morgan accused the artist's caretaker and the New York Art Publishing of isolating Indiana from friends, creating an unauthorized version of his work, and violating an agreement with Morgan. (One impressive example was “Brat,” a sculpture commissioned by a Wisconsin sausage company.) In another case, led by attorney James W. Brannan and caretaker Jamie L. Thomas, Morgan accused Indiana of cheating on the royal family.
In 2021, Morgan reached a settlement with the Star of Hope Foundation, and both sides agreed to work together to support Indiana's heritage. The terms of the settlement have not been made clear, but it appears to have something to do with the departure of Brannan and Thomas. The organization is currently overseen by a committee of cultural leaders and residents of Maine.
However, not everything is completely resolved. Morgan continues to defeat it in court along with art publisher Michael Mackenzie. It was a big victory for Morgan, with a judge in January recommending that Mackenzie's claim be fired, ruled that he had hampered Morgan's rights by creating an Indiana work that Mackenzie had no right to produce in Indiana. Also, the unresolved is the future of 2,500 additional Indiana works that Mackenzie owned, but what is considered authentic could be shared between the Legacy Initiative and the Star of Hope Foundation.
Split Legacy, Split Gallery
Previously being the Foundation of Hope and Morgan star, the two fighting sides evolved into two different organizations, each at the forefront of a different New York Gallery show. The Star of Hope Foundation, which inherited the Indiana personal art collection, chose to work with Casmin, who represents the artists from 2003 until his death at the age of 89. The foundation plans to stabilize and restore the island's homes in the hopes of using revenue from Indiana's art sales to convert them into community centers.
Meanwhile, longtime artist agent and Morgan's advisor, Salama Caro, founded the for-profit organization Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative in 2022 (he decided to work at a pace as the gallery is “multi-national” and “expanded.”
The Legacy Initiative maintains an even larger collection of Indiana works than Star of Hope, publishes the artist's catalogue Raisonné and hosts exhibitions such as “Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery,” which opened at Venice Biennale last year. (The initiative has yet to decide whether to acknowledge the emotional change in “hope,” the “love,” which Indiana created in 2008 to support Barack Obama's presidential election.
Pace founder Arne Glimcher never represented Indiana, but included the artist in a 1962 pop art important early shows. Few pieces have been sold. One buyer was King John Heinz III, heir to Ketchup's Fortune. It “has made me a more desirable character” for the artist, Grimmcher said. (Pace will begin his solo show in Hong Kong on March 25th, focusing on his involvement with Indiana's numerology.)
Having three shows by the same artist in four months, confirmed by Marc Glimcher, Arne's son, is “a very few situations that are good ideas.” But for Indiana, he added, “A moment with a lot of exposure is a good idea because there is so little exposure.”
Still, art advisor Wendy Cromwell said, “It's distracting to have two jobs and two galleries.”
Rebuilding the market
The coming months mark the first time in decades that a large group of Indiana paintings has come to the market at once. Only 510 paintings by the artists are recorded in the catalogue Raisonné. (He slowly painted and took a long break during his depression attacks.)
Eight of his top 10 auction results are for “love” paintings and sculptures. Activities at auctions are relatively small as the artist's death and the drama surrounding his fortune could throw poles. According to the ArtNet Price Database, in 2023 and 2024, more than half of the Indiana lot offered at auctions were sold because they were less than estimates.
Indiana's $4.1 million auction record was set for Christie's for “love” red and blue aluminum in 2011, falling behind many of his more famous pop peers (though the market may consider “second” pop artists like Claes Oldenberg and James Rosenquist). “The collection of energy goes where the story is still being told,” Cromwell said. “Pop art – that story is written.”
At the Chelsea show, Kasmin offers evidence of the artists of the first “love” sculpture from 1966 to 68 for $575,000. (Pace sold another version at Frieze Los Angeles last month for the same price.) The rest of the film ranges between $15,000 and $1.2 million. Within the first week, Kasmin said he sold eight pieces for a total of more than $3.5 million.
Art advisor Cromwell was among those surprised by the intriguing Casmin Show. Indiana “is not urgent because I think he knows the job,” she said. “We really don't know the job based on what I saw.”
