Enemies in the Battle Over ‘LOVE’ Artist Bury the Hatchet

Inside Kasmin Gallery in Manhattan, more than a dozen employees huddled like a football team. It was late February and the gallery’s president, Nick Olney, was giving his staff a pep talk before his version of the big game: the opening of the first New York exhibition of work by Robert Indiana since the artist’s death in 2018. Standing next to his celebrated “LOVE” sculpture, Olney laid out the game plan. The goal: a reboot.

Most people know Robert Indiana for only one thing: LOVE. The image of that four-letter word, with its jauntily tilted “o,” has appeared on city plazas, coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets worldwide.

But it is the scorched-earth battle over his legacy — complete with accusations of forgery, elder abuse and copyright infringement — that has riveted the art world since his death.

Now, after the settlement of key lawsuits, two formerly warring parties in that battle, each represented by a different Manhattan gallery, have entered into an unusual truce. They are out to prove that the artist was neither a one-hit wonder nor a cautionary tale. The stakes are high: The trove of Indiana artworks they are selling, previously tied up in litigation, is worth tens of millions of dollars.

Kasmin’s show will run through March 29. On May 9, Pace Gallery also plans to test the public’s appetite with an exhibition. It’s rare to have two galleries mounting shows of the same artist, especially one whose curb appeal is muted. To that end, both exhibitions aim to resuscitate Indiana’s lackluster market by bringing long-hidden work from his early career into the light, and to present him as an important American artist whose contributions have never been fully understood. “He’s an artist that is hiding in plain sight,” Olney said.

Galleries succeed or fail based on their ability to make artists feel relevant to contemporary audiences. But reintroducing Indiana now is a daunting task. With the art market in a slump, collectors are unwilling to compete for anything other than fresh material by a few rising talents and veritable masterpieces by brand names.

“To introduce someone who the entire world associates not only with sculpture, but one sculpture in particular — it’s almost like a whole new artist,” said the art adviser Joshua Holdeman. “Does that change everything, or is it a vain attempt at trying to breathe new life into a market that doesn’t exist for good reason?”

Time for a Reboot?

Both gallery shows focus on Indiana’s work, and especially his paintings, from the 1960s, before the runaway success of “LOVE” led some in the art world to dismiss him as a corny one-hit wonder. During that earlier period, Indiana fused the visual language of advertising, concrete poetry, and geometric abstraction to create what might be called transcendental Pop art.

But the artist, who moved to the remote Maine island of Vinalhaven to escape the pressure cooker of the New York art world in 1978, had an uneasy relationship with the art market and was resistant to commercial shows of his early work. “He basically refused to release paintings,” said Simon Salama-Caro, the artist’s former agent and founder of the Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, which aims to increase awareness of the depth and breadth of his work.

Proceeds from the Kasmin show will provide a needed influx of cash to his sole beneficiary — the Star of Hope Foundation, a nonprofit that Indiana established before his death to support the arts in Maine and make his Vinalhaven home, a former meeting hall for the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, accessible to the public. The art that Indiana left behind — which has been subject to wildly divergent valuations but was estimated to be worth around $40 million in 2021 — is the foundation’s main asset.

“I really don’t know what the true value is,” said Adam Weinberg, a board member of the foundation and the former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which mounted a retrospective of Indiana’s work in 2013, during his tenure. “This is the beginning of resetting the market, the public face of Indiana as an artist, and all of the relationships.”

Selling Indiana for a New Generation

Indiana never fit comfortably into the story of Pop Art, an international art movement that brought advertising, comic books and mass media into the realm of high culture. He was an indie loner who wrote poetry, obsessively read Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and felt drawn to spirituality. (For two years, his day job was working for an iconoclastic reverend at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Upper Manhattan.)

His art was also more autobiographical than that of many of his peers. The Kasmin show includes “Mother and Father” (1963—66), an imposing diptych featuring Indiana’s mother draped in a red cloak with her breast exposed and his father seemingly pantsless underneath a trench coat.

“It’s hard to think of something by any other American artist so blatantly, albeit enigmatically, Oedipal,” Ken Johnson wrote in a New York Times review of Indiana’s Whitney retrospective. (That show, “Beyond Love,” tried, with mixed results, to do for art history what galleries are now trying to do for the market: revive Indiana’s oeuvre in full as a prescient artist who “used words to explore themes of American identity, racial injustice, and the illusion and disillusion of love,” according to the Whitney’s promotion in 2013.)

The Kasmin exhibition also chronicles a young Indiana assimilating the work of his peers —especially his studio-mate and former lover Ellsworth Kelly — in search of his own artistic voice. Presented alongside Indiana’s 1959 painting of an egg-shaped form is a journal in which he expresses concern that the work might be “too ‘Kelly’ for comfort.”

The packaging of both shows reveals much about what galleries believe it takes to sell an artist to a new generation today. Both Pace and Kasmin highlight the artist’s progressive politics and his queer identity. Pace’s exhibition includes a 1961 painting, “The Calumet,” with the names of various Native American tribes that Oliver Shultz, the gallery’s chief curator, likened to a contemporary land acknowledgment.

“It does help that he is not this image of a barfighting, macho New York artist,” Olney said. “He was staunchly antiracist and packed his politics into his work, which a lot of artists hadn’t.”

An Unusual Alliance

The Indiana exhibitions are designed to create a fresh start after years of very expensive, very public legal squabbles over his work and legacy. “The only thing the market doesn’t like is uncertainty,” Marc Glimcher, the chief executive of Pace, said. Yet two shows taking place in close succession at two galleries may muddle his legacy. Who, exactly, is in charge here?

The split shows stem from Indiana’s decision in the 1990s to sign over the rights to some of his best-known works, including “LOVE,” to a for-profit company, the Morgan Art Foundation, in exchange for regular payments. In the 2018 lawsuit, Morgan accused the artist’s caretaker and a New York art publisher of isolating Indiana even from his friends and creating unauthorized versions of his work, violating his agreement with Morgan. (One striking example was “BRAT,” a sculpture commissioned by a Wisconsin sausage company.) In a separate lawsuit, the estate, led at the time by a lawyer, James W. Brannan, and the caretaker, Jamie L. Thomas, accused Morgan of cheating Indiana out of royalties he was owed, which Morgan denied.

In 2021, Morgan reached a settlement with the Star of Hope Foundation and both sides agreed to work together to support Indiana’s legacy. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, though it seems to have involved the departure of Brannan and Thomas. The organization is now overseen by a board of cultural leaders and Maine residents.

Not everything is entirely settled, however: Morgan continues to slug it out in court with the art publisher, Michael McKenzie. In a significant win for Morgan, in January a judge dismissed McKenzie’s claims and ruled that McKenzie had interfered with Morgan’s rights by making Indiana works that he did not have the rights to produce. Also unresolved is the future of 2,500 additional Indiana works McKenzie had in his possession, though those that are deemed authentic are likely to be shared between the Legacy Initiative and the Star of Hope Foundation.

Split Legacy, Split Galleries

The two formerly warring sides — the Star of Hope Foundation and Morgan — have evolved into two different organizations, each spearheading a different New York gallery show. The Star of Hope Foundation, which inherited Indiana’s personal art collection, opted to work with Kasmin, which represented the artist from 2003 until his death at age 89. The foundation plans to use the proceeds from the sale of Indiana’s art to stabilize and restore his island home, with the hope of converting it into a community center.

Meanwhile, Salama-Caro, the artist’s longtime agent and an adviser to Morgan, established the for-profit Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative in 2022. (He decided to work with Pace because the gallery is “multinational” and “expanding,” the agent said.)

The Legacy Initiative maintains an even larger collection of Indiana work than Star of Hope, publishes the artist’s catalogue raisonné, and organizes exhibitions like “Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery,” which opened during last year’s Venice Biennale. (The initiative has not yet determined whether it will admit “Hope” — the emotional variation on “Love” that Indiana created to support Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, and for which McKenzie owns the copyright — into the catalogue raisonné, leaving the fate of that part of his oeuvre unsettled.)

Arne Glimcher, Pace’s founder, never represented Indiana but included the artist in an important early show of Pop Art in 1962. Only a few works sold, he recalled in an interview, but two were by Indiana. The buyer of one was John Heinz III, an heir to the ketchup fortune. That “made me a more desirable character” to the artist, Glimcher said.(Pace is opening a solo show in Hong Kong on March 25 focused on Indiana’s engagement with numerology.)

“There are very few situations where it’s a good idea” to have three shows by the same artist in four months, Marc Glimcher, Arne’s son, admitted. But for Indiana, he added, “there’s so little exposure that a moment when there’s a lot of exposure is a good idea.”

Still, the art adviser Wendy Cromwell said, “it can be distracting that there are two bodies of work and two galleries.”

Rebuilding a Market

The next few months represent the first time in decades that a large grouping of Indiana’s paintings has come to market at once. Only 510 paintings by the artist are recorded in the catalogue raisonné. (He painted slowly and took long long breaks during bouts of depression.)

Eight of his top 10 auction results are for “LOVE” paintings or sculptures. There has been relatively little activity at auction since the artist’s death and the drama surrounding his estate could be casting a pall. In 2023 and 2024, more than half the Indiana lots offered at auction sold for less than their estimates, according to the Artnet Price Database.

Indiana’s auction record of $4.1 million, set at Christie’s in 2011 for a red and blue aluminum “LOVE,” also lags behind many of his more famous Pop peers (though it is in line with those the market might consider “second-tier” Pop artists, like Claes Oldenberg and James Rosenquist). “Collecting energy goes to where the story is still being told,” Cromwell said. “Pop Art — that story has been written.”

In its show in Chelsea, Kasmin is offering the artist’s proof of the first “LOVE” sculpture, from 1966-68, for $575,000. (Pace sold another version at Frieze Los Angeles last month for around the same price.) The rest of the works are going between $150,000 and $1.2 million. Within the first week, Kasmin said it sold eight works, for a total of more than $3.5 million.

Cromwell, the art adviser, was among those surprised to find herself intrigued by the Kasmin show. Indiana “doesn’t feel urgent because we think we know the work,” she said. “Based on what I’ve seen, we don’t really know the work.”