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but they had a carefree attitude, a let-'em-die attitude."

Indianan himself, however, was sufficiently moved by the scene to portray it in his Fire Bridge painting, which shows the Brooklyn Bridge illuminated by a fiery, apocalyptic glow.

It wasn't until 1961 that anyone took much notice of Indiana as an artist. But that person was Alfred Barr, the Museum of Modern Art's director of collections, who had helped put Jasper Johns on the map two years earlier. Indiana was invited to participate in a little exhibition downstairs from the Martha Jackson Gallery, and Barr visited the show the day after it closed. He bought Indiana's The American Dream, a dramatic star-spangled canvas with a title lifted from Edward Albee's play and imagery lifted from pinball machines. It is a landmark piece in the development of pop art - linking the "high" abstract art of Kelly to the "low" art of sign writing and echoing the hectic colors and energy of Stuart Davis and the startling frontality of Johns.

Soon, Indiana began to live The Dream. The pop art onslaught was under way, and he was part of the gang. "Pop art was simply a reaction to the commercial mentality of America, and I was a peripheral figure," said Indiana on one occasion. Another time, however, he proudly declared: "There are six pop artists. I am one of the six."

His work was part of "The Art of Assemblage" show at the Modern in 1961. The following year, he was invited to participate in the show that launched pop - "New Realists" at the Sidney Janis Gallery - and he was picked up by Eleanor Ward for a solo show at her Stable Gallery, where his stablemates would include Andy Warhol and the pop sculptor Marisol.

In 1963, he had an entire room devoted to his art at the Museum of Modern Art's "Americans" show. It was, he says, "one of the most important, most exciting things in my life." According to David Bourdon, "many artist, including Andy Warhol, were jealous of Indiana. They were jealous that he was in the 'Americans' show and that he was one of the most discussed artists in the show."

In many ways, Indiana's works provided the clearest examples of the pop aesthetic. In a series of paintings of the numbers 0 through 9, now in the collection of Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, Indiana appropriated the figure 5 from a 1928 painting by Charles Demuth. The number-5 painting is a prime example of pop art's voracious appetite for using preexisting graphics. (It was also a premonition of the appropriation epidemic of the 1980s.) Indiana's numerous series of number paintings and prints, moreover, are classic pop because of their serial nature; like Warhol's silk screens and the elegant repetitions of the minimalist artists, Indiana's numbers emphasize that a painting is a link in a chain of associations and that a work of art invariably gets its meaning form its context.

Among the "six" pop artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, and Tom Wesselmann, nobody was more aggressive about getting to the top than Warhol. To promote Stable Gallery and give it a pop art profile, Warhol suggested that he and Indiana collaborate on Eat, a movie to be named after one of Indiana's most blatant pop paintings.

The two Eats, Indiana's and Warhol's have little to do with each other, just like Indiana and Warhol themselves; they exemplify the two extremes of pop - the brassy and the banal. Indiana's Eat and its companion painting, Die, both from 1962, are dazzling, diamond-shaped canvases with their colorful titles emblazoned across their girth, whereas Warhol's movie is monochromatic and monotonous. Shot at the end of 1963, his Eat shows Indiana in his loft on the slip eating a mushroom - for forty-five long minutes.

Although Indiana calls the film "pure poetry," he has his doubts about Warhol's mastery of the medium. "While we were shooting it," says Indiana, "his camera was falling apart, he was putting it back together with paper clips, and I was thinking, God, why are we wasting our time? I didn't think it was very professional. Of course, it was many reels, and he didn't put them back in the proper order, so the film is jumping about...Real pro, real pro."

Just before he died in 1987, Warhol quipped that his early films are perhaps better talked about than seen. Indiana agrees. "Without a doubt," he says. "Except for  Blow Job."

THE WORDS IN INDIANA'S CANVASES made his work stand out from that of the other pop artists. They were also the cause of acrimony among his friends. "There was a prejudice against using words," he says. "Most people don't like to see words. In the Muslim world, mosques are decorated only with gorgeous arabesque words. But our culture has a block against this... [Yet] I always considered myself a poet, and I always considered my art to be concrete poetry."

As Indiana's pop style became more pronounced, his statements became more blunt, and lines of poetry were reduced to simple exclamations. Experimenting with punchy three- and four-letter words stenciled onto wood sculptures and paintings, Indiana inevitably hit on the real thing: he drew a black-and-white schema for a painting called Fuck.

According to Indiana, the person most upset by his use of words in paintings has been Kelly. So Indiana showed him his draft for Fuck. Kelly was, Indiana says, "absolutely horrified...He said that if I ever exhibited it he'd never speak to me again. I never exhibited it. But the damage was done."

"I don't remember it," counters Kelly. "I probably just said I don't care for it. I'm not a confrontational artist. I don't like to rub people's faces in it. It's a little bit like overkill. He wanted to be controversial."

Indiana was chastened, so he toned down and dreamed up  Love. Indeed, the evolution of his pivotal work suggests that Love is a watered-down version of the former. "There's no question," says Indiana now. "That's the reason for the tilted O. It's an erection."

In 1964, Love became the most popular Christmas card that the Museum of Modern Art had ever published. When he was invited to design the card, Indiana painted three studies, and they became the beginning of the end. "Having done three small paintings," Indiana claims, "I didn't go on doing Love paintings because of the success of the Christmas card. I simply did it because I liked the Love paintings and they got bigger and bigger and more and more and more and it never stopped. I'm still doing Love.


AUGUST 1991              95