Robert Indiana: The Hartley Elegies

Robert Indiana, The Hartley Elegies: The Berlin Series, KVF IX, 1991, serigraph, 57 ½” x 57 ½”

By Margery Gordon

Pop art icon Robert Indiana’s series of imposing serigraphs in homage to Modernist master Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) are at once commemorative and reflexive, intertwining the influences, identities, and attachments of two quintessential American painters.

When Indiana embarked on the Hartley Elegies in 1989, he took as his starting point the “German Officer” series Hartley painted 75 years earlier at the outset of World War I during a Berlin-based period, now viewed as a highpoint of his career (although American audiences at the time were not receptive to his subject matter). Hartley’s style was then influenced by German Expressionists like Vassily Kandinsky, and the Cubist compositions he had encountered at Gertrude Stein’s salons during a prior stay in Paris. His abstract portraits eulogized Karl von Freyburg, the German soldier and object of Hartley’s affection who was killed in the early days of the war - not through figurative representation but rather the accretion of letters, numbers, geometric patterns, and military regalia that included the Iron Cross medal awarded to his beloved friend the day before his death.

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The Hartley Elegies: The Berlin Series, KVF V, 1990, serigraph, 77 ¼” x 53”

These symbols echo in the personalized lexicon of the Elegies, where they mingle with dates, initials, and emblems that transmit Indiana’s own obsessions and interpretations. “He was fascinated by the earlier artist’s use of letters, words, and numbers to summon forth a presence,” writes Susan Elizabeth Ryan in her essay for the catalog published by the Bates College Museum of Art, in Lewiston, Maine, the repository of Hartley’s archives and recipient of Indiana’s 1991 donation of the Elegies. Ryan reports that Indiana, a self-professed “sign painter,” had recognized his affinity with Hartley before encountering his predecessor’s ghost in Vinalhaven, an island off the Maine coast where Hartley had summered in the late 1930s, near the end of his life.

Indiana retreated to Vinalhaven in 1978 and set about restoring the former lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal society who had christened it “The Star of Hope” and left behind some of their ephemera that resurfaced in the Elegies– most notably the motto “Friendship, Truth, and Love,” which Indiana transposed and stenciled into some of the rings that lend order to overlapping elements. Other circling words included cities where the two artists had resided, the names of von Freyburg and Hartley, and the German phrases “der Amerikanische maler” (”the American painter”) and “Ich bin ein Berliner” (”I am a citizen of Berlin”). That quote from John F. Kennedy’s historic 1963 speech at the Berlin Wall resonated a quarter-century later as the wall began to fall, in the same month when Indiana began working on the five rectangular and five diamond-shaped prints.

Indiana’s facility with the silkscreen process achieves a richness of color to rival paint on canvas, and a layering effect that belies his trademark flatness of form. His vibrant hues, bold type, and precise lines made his LOVE prints, paintings, and sculptures into ubiquitous icons. The Elegies reflect less traditional expressions of love between men divided by war and time.

Robert Indiana’s Hartley Elegies are on display through January 2011 at Etra Fine Art in the Miami Design District. 50 NE 40th St., 33137. Phone: 305 438 4383 / www.etrafineart.com

Margery Gordon is a freelance arts journalist who works for ARTnews, Art + Auction, ArtInfo.com, and the official Art Basel Miami Beach Magazine, among other publications. She is a professor at Barry University in Miami.