Tag: robert indiana

Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Orange”

Ellsworth Kelly, “Blue Orange”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 40.6 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Using elements of Color Field, hard-edge painting and Minimalism, Ellsworth Kelly created a distinctive personal style of graceful, simple forms skillfully executed with an unassuming technique. He began making abstract paintings in 1949. Three years later, Kelly discovered the late work of Claude Monet and began to paint more effortlessly using large formats and monochrome colors. By the end of the 1950s, his paintings had bridged the gap between reductive Minimalism and American Geometric Abstraction. 

Kelly gifted his 1957 “Blue Orange” to painter Robert Indiana. The painting,  a physical memory of the bond between two iconic American painters,  is inscribed on the reverse with “EK 1957 FOR ROBERT AN ORANGE PEEL FROM PIER 7”. It was Kelly who introduced Indiana to the New York City’s famed Coenties Slip area, a section of Manhattan’s financial district that became the home of many ground-breaking American artists. Finding themselves neighbors, Kelly and Indiana forged a bond that eventually turned into a close and intimate friendship that sparked their creative energy and influenced their entire careers. 

In the early 1960s, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana’s relationship eventually came to an end. The heartbreak Indiana felt ultimately led him to create his iconic LOVE imagery. Designed in 1965 for the Museum of Modern Art, Indiana’s tricolor arrangement for the “LOVE” Christmas card -red, blue and green- was seemingly influenced by Kelly’s most recognizable color palette. Although born from sadness and loss, Indiana’s four-letter word became the hope and optimism that would ultimately shape his career. 

Kelly’s early development was influenced by the geometric and biomorphic works of Jean and Sophie Taeber-Arp as well as the work of Henri Mattisse whose paintings he saw while living in Paris between 1949 and 1952. Kelly’s main concerns, like those of Matisse, were based on the pursuit of pure form and color. He always looked to nature for his inspiration, either through photographs he had taken of his surroundings or the simple everyday experiences of his life. 

The sweeping organic shape of Kelly’s “Blue Orange” is a study in nature that is both abstracted and two-dimensional. Emitting a warm orange glow, it is both minimal, yet powerful, and perfectly formed in its simplicity. Kelly used the simple organic form of an orange peel held against a clear blue sky to create an intimate exploration of pure color and form. Until his death, Robert Indiana kept this painting in his collection- a memory of a shared experience on southern Manhattan’s Pier 7 sixty years prior. 

Robert Indian passed away in his home on the nineteenth of May in 2018, just a few weeks before the opening of his sculptural retrospective at the Albright-Know Art Gallery. Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Orange” was later put up for auction at Christie’s New York and sold in November of 2018 for USD 2, 772, 500. 

Insert Image: Hans Namuth, “Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly, 1958”, 1991, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Hans Namuth Estate

Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana, Three Paintings from the Hartley Elegies Series

Robert Indiana’s Hartley Elegies (1989-1994) is a series of 18 paintings, grouped into three formats, rectangular, diamond and tondo. A poignant meditation on identity and loss, they are the most recent of his homages to American artists and poets, and were inspired by Marsden Hartley’s War Motif series, which Hartley executed as a tribute to the young German soldier Karl von Freyburg, who died during World War I and with whom Hartley had a deep friendship.

Indiana employs Hartley’s stylized visual language throughout the Elegies, while reinvesting them with additional content and meaning. He weaves references to Hartley and von Freyburg with allusions to himself, to places and historical events with overlapping symbolic meanings, forming a web linking his life to Hartley’s.

KvF I, the first of Indiana’s Elegies, (the first image above) is based on Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer (1914), which Indiana had seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Indiana’s painting is a close interpretation of the work, faithfully incorporating the motifs of German World I pageantry and references to von Freyburg found in Hartley’s painting. These include the Iron Cross, which von Freyburg was awarded just before his death, the numeral 4, the number of von Freyburg’s regimen, the numeral 24, the age of von Freyburg at his death, and von Freyburg’s initials, KvF.

Indiana also employs the red, green, black, white, blue and yellow color scheme of Portrait of a German Officer, however he transforms Hartley’s thick brushwork and muted tones into his signature hard-edged lines and bright saturated color. He also adds a significant motif, a large central ring containing text, which is found in many of the subsequent Elegies.

In KvF I Karl von Freyburg’s name is spelled out in white letters in the top half, and the date October 7 appears between the years 1914 and 1989 in the bottom half. October 7, 1914 was the date of von Freyburg’s death and October 7, 1989 the date, exactly seventy-five years later, that Indiana began working on the Elegies. By including the latter date Indiana inserts himself into the series and links himself to Hartley and von Freyburg, asserting his kinship with the men.