Robert Indiana: ONE through ZERO

May 11 – November 30, 2017

Numbers fill my life.
They fill my life even more than love.
We are immersed in numbers from the moment we are born….
By creating them, I’ve invested those numbers with a quality they have never had before.*
Robert Indiana

NEW CANAAN, Conn. (May 12, 2017) – The Glass House is pleased to present the first public installation anywhere of the complete set of Robert Indiana’s ONE through ZERO, ten 6-foot-high COR-TEN steel sculptures that were conceived in 1980 and executed in 2003. Visitors will find these monumental works located in a field just to the south of the Glass House itself, where they have been placed to accentuate the edge of the hill that separates the house from the pond and pavilion below. Taking advantage of the changes of level in the landscape and the visual connections with many highlights of the property, the installation conjoins Philip Johnson and Robert Indiana’s visionary approach to industrial materials, proportion, form and the understanding of space.

The positioning of the sculptures allows them to be seen directly from the Glass House, while establishing sightlines from the artworks to other significant pavilions and structures, including the Studio, Ghost House and Da Monsta. The site is also notable as an area where Philip Johnson considered placing a small chapel toward the end of his life. The installation of ONE through ZERO is in keeping with Johnson’s approach to placing pavilions and structures within the landscape.

The Glass House welcomes visitors to explore how these powerful works interact with our landscape and respond to light and shadow throughout the seasons. The work will remain on view through November 2017.

Numbers first appeared in Indiana’s work in the late 1950s. Inspired by abandoned materials that he found in the studio he’d taken on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan—an old printer’s calendar, and a set of brass die-cut stencils that were relics of the shipping trade—he started to apply letters and numbers to his sculptural assemblages and paintings. Indiana has said that “the numbers had a kind of robustness and…crude vigor which I liked.”

Stenciled numbers and letters were features of the wooden sculptures that first attracted Philip Johnson’s attention to Indiana’s work. When Indiana’s sculpture LAW (1960-62) was exhibited in 1962 at The Museum of Modern Art, Johnson purchased the work, invited Indiana to visit the Glass House and proposed that the artist might create a work for the New York State Pavilion that Johnson was designing for the upcoming World’s Fair. (Johnson subsequently donated LAW to MoMA’s permanent collection.) In late October 1962, Johnson purchased Indiana’s painting A Divorced Man Has Never Been the President (1961) from the artist’s first solo exhibition at Stable Gallery and installed the work at the Glass House. Indiana became one of ten artists (including Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol) to create works for the façade of the New York State Pavilion at the World’s Fair. When the New York State Theater opened at Lincoln Center in 1964—this building, too, was designed by Philip Johnson in conjunction with the World’s Fair—the poster for it was based on a painting created by Indiana, which hung in the lobby. The image featured elements that by this time were signatures of Indiana: letters and numbers executed in a bold, stencil-like style.

As art historian and curator Barbara Haskell explains,“Numbers had appeared in Indiana’s work even before words, functioning variously as the abstract ‘names’ of his anthropomorphic terms, as metaphors for the passage of time, and as reminders of vernacular American culture.” Several suites of paintings in the 1960s and 1970s—including The Numbers (1965) and Decade Autoportraits (1972-1976) were significant precedents for the monumental sculptures of ONE through ZERO.

Indiana has stated that each number represents a stage of life, beginning with one (birth) and continuing through nine (old age) and zero (death). According to renowned art historian John Wilmerding, Indiana’s numbers can be considered akin to 19th-century artist Thomas Cole’s series of paintings on the ages of man. Indiana has noted that a 19th-century metaphorical print entitled The Life and Age of Man: Stages of Man’s Life from the Cradle to the Grave, inspired him as he created this sculptural series. This print was given to Indiana while he was an artist in residence at Dartmouth College in 1969 and remains in his personal collection.

As the Glass House commemorates its 10th year of welcoming the public, this 10-sculpture installation is especially appropriate, since COR-TEN steel was a material favored by Johnson and lines the paths linking the Glass House and its sister building, the Brick House. The combination of monumentality, wit and underlying seriousness of intention makes ONE through ZERO especially suited for exhibition at our site, which at its heart continues to celebrate the ethos of Philip Johnson and David Whitney.

The exhibition is organized by Chief Curator & Creative Director Hilary Lewis and Cole Akers, Curator and Special Projects Manager. Architectural and exhibition assistance was provided by Aaron McDonald, ADG McDonald Architects.

The exhibition has been made possible through generous support from the Morgan Art Foundation.

*Robert Indiana, Marius B. Péladeau and Martin Dibner. Indiana’s Indianas: A 20-Year Retrospective of Paintings and Sculpture from the Collection of Robert Indiana. Rockland: William A. Farnsworth Art Museum and Library, 1982.

Robert Indiana (born 1928) One of the preeminent figures in American art since the 1960s, Robert Indiana has played a central role in the development of assemblage art, hard-edge painting and Pop art. A self proclaimed “American painter of signs,” Indiana has created a highly original body of work that explores American identity, personal history and the power of abstraction and language, establishing an important legacy that resonates in the work of many contemporary artists who make the written word a central element of their oeuvre.

Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana on September 13, 1928. Adopted as an infant, he spent his childhood moving frequently throughout his namesake state. In 1942 he moved to Indianapolis to attend Arsenal Technical High School, known for its strong arts curriculum. After graduating he spent three years in the U.S. Air Force and then studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in Maine, and the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

Within a few years of moving to New York City, where he became part of a circle that included Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman, Indiana gained repute as one of the most creative artists of his generation and was featured in influential New York shows such as New Forms – New Media at the Martha Jackson Gallery (1960), Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art (1961) and The New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery (1962). In 1961, the Museum of Modern Art acquired The American Dream, I (1961), establishing Indiana as one of the most significant members of the new generation of Pop artists who were eclipsing the prominent painters of the New York School. Indiana distinguished himself from his Pop peers, however, by explicitly addressing important social and political issues and incorporating historical and literary references into his works.

The word “love,” a theme central to Indiana’s work, first appeared in the painting Four Star Love (1961). Indiana subsequently experimented with a composition of stacked letters, turning this inventive design, a formal departure from his previous works, into different hard-edged color variations on canvas. Indiana’s LOVE, selected by the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 for its Christmas card, quickly permeated wider popular culture.

In 1978, Indiana chose to remove himself from the New York art world. He settled on the remote island of Vinalhaven in Maine, moving into the Star of Hope, a Victorian building that had previously served as an Odd Fellows Lodge, where he continued to make important, meaningful work.

Indiana’s artwork has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, and his works are in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Ablright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, the Museum Ludwig in Vienna, the Shanghai Art Museum in China, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He has also been included in numerous international publications and is the subject of a number of monographs.

The Glass House was built between 1949 and 1995 by architect Philip Johnson, the Glass House is a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation located in New Canaan, CT. The pastoral 49-acre landscape comprises fourteen structures, including the Glass House (1949), and features a permanent collection of 20th century painting and sculpture, along with temporary exhibitions. The tour season runs from May through November and advance reservations are required. For more information, and to purchase tickets, visit www.theglasshouse.org.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a privately funded nonprofit organization that works to save America’s historic places to enrich our future. For more information, please visit www.savingplaces.org.