Robert Indiana interviews, 1963 Sept. 12-1963 Nov. 7

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Robert Indiana interviews, 1963 Sept. 12-1963 Nov. 7, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

 

 

 

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH
ROBERT INDIANA
IN HIS STUDIO-SEPTEMBER 12, 1963
INTERVIEWER: RICHARD BROWN BAKER

 

RB: RICHARD BROWN BAKER
RI: ROBERT INDIANA

RB: This is Richard Brown Baker, September 12, 1963. I am in the studio of Robert Indiana, a young painter whose fame, I should imagine, is only two years old, perhaps three years old. . .

RI: Fame isn't that old, Richard.

RB: In any event, this is early in his public career, but he's already quite well-known, and I'm going to begin by reading one or two statements that have been made about his painting by critics. In the New York Post of October 28, 1962, Irving Sandler wrote: "Indiana is sentimental about the American scene and Pop culture, but he also tries to be tough and ironic. Composed of interestingly painted hard-edge, flat forms and stenciled words and phrases the texts are from the names of corporations, highways, Melville, Whitman, Longfellow. His canvases look like pinball machines, roadside signs and signals." I'll just interrupt - there's one more sentence - but that, I think, is a kind of more or less accurate factual description of your painting, or. . .

RI: It is of several canvases, Dick, that's for sure.

RB: He, I presume, was discussing your first show at the Stable Gallery when he wrote this.

RI: I think this is. . .

RB: So it would be relating to that particular batch of paintings. Now there is one more sentence to Mr. Sandler's comment which you might want to make some remarks about. Sandler said: "The trouble with Indiana's simplified images is that they come across loud and clear as symbols for the American scene but not as profound visual experiences." Now, do you want to defend yourself against that, or. . .?

RI: I think all I can say about that is, Mr. Sandler perhaps needs to look at my paintings a little bit longer.

RB: That's very possibly the case, of course, because they would be the sort of paintings that would have rather subtle visual impact so that it would not automatically be perceptible. . .

RI: A little more exposure and he might be a little bit more sympathetic.

RB: Well, even before that was written, as a matter of fact, in the Art News of September 1962, G. R. Swenson wrote: "Indiana's concern with unsuspected artistic juxtapositions is subtle and concrete. There was something impudent in these works, something so simple-minded and obvious as to be unsuspected."

RI: Certainly Mr. Swenson must have seen something a little bit more than Ms. Sandler and this is as I would hope it would be.

RB: Well, Mr. Swenson has perhaps a greater familiarity with your work than Sandler.

RI: Much greater.

RB: More recently, on July 28, 1963, The Providence Sunday Journal published a review of the show at the Museum of Modern Art in which you are represented and this article was written by a man named Lawrence Rubin. He said, "The forms of Robert Indiana derive from slot machines, pin-wheels and amusement park art but are transformed in his hands to extremely simple geometric and verbal statements. The decorative and abstract elements seem to be a means toward both a childlike fantasy and sly social criticism." Do you consider you are consciously doing social criticism, or is this sly social criticism something that gets there perhaps without very great intention on your part?

RI: I don't think I really mean it to be - shall we say? - sly, Dick.

RB: No, you may not mean it to be sly, but do you mean it as social criticism?

RI: There is in certain paintings overt social criticism, yes.

RB: You see, I was recently talking with Richard Stankiewicz about his sculpture and I read him some statements that had been made in reference to his work and he said he was amused by a great many of the critical remarks that read into his sculpture social satire that he did not have very strongly in the forefront of his mid as he did the work. So since I had this experience with him very recently, I was tempted to ask you right now what degree of "message" you intend by your paintings?

RI: In many of them the message is very conscious and very strong and, in my mind, explicit. It might be enigmatic to, shall we say? The general public, but I don't particularly mean there should. . .

RB: Well, when I entered the studio this afternoon my eye immediately lit upon a painting which I at one admired, the title Yield Brother - which hangs opposite us at this moment. And you told me that it was going to be sent to England to. . .

RI: Well, it is a contribution t the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, and there's going to be an exhibit at Woburn Abbey this fall in London, and of al the paints contributed by artists from all over the world, the proceeds from this exhibit and sale will go to the Foundation for Peace, which I think is a new wing of Russell's activity. This painting Yield Brother actually has been painted expressly for the Foundation and in it I have incorporated a symbol which the "Ban the Bomb" people use, and that is the death. . .

RB: You said, which the "somebody" people use - I didn't quite get that phrase.

RI: All those people who are affiliated with Russell in his ban nuclear war.

RB: Oh: You said "Ban the Bomb" - Was that the phrase you used? It wasn't quite clear to my ear.

RI: Yes. They have adopted this symbol which is actually an old medieval symbol, and it is "death to man" is the significance of it. And, of course, that's what the bomb stands for. But it was from an earlier painting of mine which has been done for, oh, about two years. And therefore the theme Yield Brother I have had in mind for a long time. But I have brought it up to date with this new symbolism.

RB: Well, I think this is a very relevant situation to this subject that I brought up on basis of his remark about social criticism because you pointed out to me that also hanging is a smaller, earlier painting which has the phrase Yield Brother that you said you did several years ago and this does not have, I take it, this symbol that the Russell "Ban the Bomb" people. . .

RI: Right. Quite right. The Small painting uses the direct inspiration and this refers to some of the comments about my work that you have just been reading. This is taken from a street sign which means yield, give the right of way to either pedestrian or some oncoming traffic, and it is a very much simpler symbol than the Russell but actually very much through the simple round field has only been -- the only addition necessary was the two arms or, as you like it, legs of man himself.

RB: Well, it's too bad that the tape hasn't got photographs of the two paintings as we talk about them but I think this is a very interesting illustration of this question because, can you remember back to the time that you painted the small painting? And you did it with this traffic sign and Yield Brother. Therefore, I would imagine that if you had a reference to a situation you were thinking perhaps in terms of traffic - yield brother, yield the right of way. Is that what it would have. . .?

RI: That was the . . . of course, that's the reference from the traffic standpoint. This is not at all what my painting is about. By adopting the Biblical language of Yield Brother, and it is Biblical language, I bring this up into a question of - shall we say? Christian ethics, and certainly my Yield Brother, my new painting, is very much addressed to a civilization which is supposed to be governed by Christian ethics.

RB: Well, I'm trying to clarify in my understanding whether your original creation, whether there was any real emphasis in your mind on a message. I

recognize. . .of course, you know there are artistic elements to the painting, formal values and all the rest, it both these paintings, but now I am just trying to attack this one question of the social message because it happens that the larger painting Yield Brother does seem to fit the category of a painting with a message, you might say, or motivation behind it. The very fact that you have done it to send to a political or a philosophic movement as a contribution and that you have embodied into it a symbol, as you describe, means that this is a conscious artistic message on your part.

RI: There is, Dick; and, of course, by doing this second painting, especially for the organization, the message has picked up, it's been added to and its importance is greater than in the first painting. The political overtones in the second painting were totally missing from the first. There is a political connotation, there is the philosophic, there is the social. Whereas in the first painting it was purely a social message and that is that I am addressing people with something like - shall we say? The gold rule. And that is a personal, social message that any resistance is good to put down in a personal, psychological manner.

RB: Well, I've always had the impression from that I've read that when an artist attempts too strongly to convey a message, he's apt to ruin the artistic value of his work, but I will testify that in my personal judgment this new painting, with the conscious political intention, is a superior work of art. The formal results are very satisfactory to me. Now, speaking of formal results, I wanted to read one other critical comment that was made on your work by Sam Hunter. He says, "The paintings of Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana can also be linked to the movement toward a more rigorous formality." Now you would agree with that, would you not?

RI: I would agree, and I think this is probably the more important aspect of my work. The messages that my work might contain, the verbal aspects, the use of words, certainly I never mean for it to be more than - shall we say? -fifty percent of the total and sometimes my active interest is much less than that. It is the formal aspect of my painting which fascinates me most.

RB: Mr. Hunter referred to Ellsworth Kelly, and I just will make the statement that he is a neighbor of yours in this section of New York and i believe is an old personal friend of yours. Is that correct?

RI: Ellsworth was probably my first artist friend in New York upon my arrival here - oh, almost eight, seven years ago, and he's been a neighbor ever since and we have been very close friends.

RB: And you would freely acknowledge that he represents a kind of - what do we say? - intellectual influence, or that you think in parallel lines, to a certain extent, about creative art? In other words, you both are hard-edge aspect of my work I owe very much to my admiration of Kelly's---

RB: Well, that's very interesting because your work does not really resemble his. Nobody possibly would confuse your paintings with his, I don't think. I don't suppose there's ever been an Ellsworth Kelly containing words, has there?

RI: There never has been, and I don't think anyone has ever---There's absolutely no room for confusion. As I say, it's only a matter of technique itself, not style, not content, not form, not anything.

RB: Well, we are eventually going to go into your life on a more or less chronological basis but it might not be inappropriate now to ask whether your painting before you knew Ellsworth Kelly, before you came here, was in any way hard-edge, or how it differed from your present style?

RI: The actual technique, the process of painting flat color and simple geometric edges all dates from my time here on Coenties Slip. The connecting aspect between my present work and my earlier paintings, (and there really are in existence not too many of those anymore), I was always very concerned with a rather central image and one of a very fixed quality. When I was painting portraits and - shall we say? -rather allegorical heads, which is the figurative work which immediately preceded the direction I have since gone, these images were always of a very fixed, rigid quality and, of course, my work still has this aspect.

RB: I'm not sure I fully conceive what you mean by "fixed." Can you elaborate?

RI: Yes, certainly. My work never had any element of movement, motion, compositional flux, any of those things which are associated with art since the Renaissance, shall we say? In other words, the pre-art, before the Renaissance, the Romanesque and the Byzantine, were all --- People where fixed. This is what my work would have been closer to.

RB: Is "rigid" an analogous word at all, or. . .?

RI: I use it only because of its application to hard-edge. I find that there's a play between the two.

RB: You see, I haven't ever seen these earlier pictures and portraits to which you're referring so I don't have the advantage of visualizing what you did then. And it's nevertheless my impression --- You and I met quite a few years ago --- and at that time you had not exhibited and I had never seen any of your work, in fact i don't think I saw any of your work until -- well, the last time I was here, but I'm not sure when that was. . . that was two years ago, or less than two years ago? Anyway, you already had developed this style quite characteristically, not refined it perhaps to the extent that you since have, but I mean it was definitely there as a style. And the influence, if it was such technically, that you derived from Ellsworth Kelly was already manifest in all these things. You have always been rather opposed to the very fluid kind of painting, the messy type, haven't you?

RI: Well, I haven't necessarily been opposed to it, Dick, but I certainly have never been much taken up with it and have never felt myself very comfortable in that kind of an expression.

RB: Bob, I always like to ask each artist to say his name on the tape, to pronounce it. Would you do that?

RI: Robert Indiana.

RB: Now, I always also ask them, and in this case it's a particularly fruitful question, have you ever used any other name? In your case, I think you are really not Robert Indiana by birth?

RI: Robert Indiana is definitely a "nom de brush" - shall we say? - and --- However, it is the only

name that I use now, and the only name that I care to use.

RB: But, for historical -- Well, the telephone directory still has you listed under Robert Clark. If you're not going to say Robert Clark, I'm going to say it.

RI: You may. You may.

RB: What was your father's name?

RI: Earl Clark.

RB: Earl Clark. And you spell Clark with or without an "e"?

RI: I don't. But he spelled it without.

RB: He spelled it without an "e." When were you born?

RI: September 13, 1928.

RB: Where?

RI: Newcastle, Indiana.

RB: And at that time, what was the circumstance of your parents' life, what was you father's career?

RI: My whole life, Dick, was very much affected and bound up with that phenomenon called the Depression, and at the time of my infancy, (that was a little bit before the Depression), my father was connected with oil companies, worked for Phillips "66" a little later, and of course that Phillips "66" sign, which haunted most of my childhood, I suppose now I am just beginning to react to it. It was always an image which was very central in my whole life.

RB: Had you older brother and sisters?

RI: None.

RB: And how long had your parents been married when you were born?

RI: Oh, I really don't know offhand. . .

RB: Well, I mean, several years or only just young newlyweds?

RI: Yes. A few years - not newlyweds - a few years.

RB: Well, it's my notion that it's interesting to have some idea of the first visual experiences of an artist. In other words, what the kind of physical environment in which you emerged from being a baby into being a child, and what kind of a home that was. Was it in the country, or the city? Was it a large house. . .?

RI: Well, first of all, I think it's pertinent to say that my mother suffered from wanderlust and that before I was seventeen years old I had lived in twenty-one different houses.

RB: Ha, we'll go through each one of those. . .

RI: Yes.

RB: Now we're on the first one that you remember.

RI: The first that I remember?

RB: Yes.

RI: Of course, that's pretty much lost in infancy. I remember bits and pieces of several different houses.

RB: Well, you've already mentioned this recollection of the Phillips "66" sign and what I'm trying to discover is if you have any, if you retain any particular early sensations or memories of decoration in the home or furniture, or paintings on the walls. . .?

RI: I must have. I can --- Although I lived in all these different houses, the furniture and the paintings on the wall were consistent from the very beginning to the end, because there again the Depression figured into that, and that is that the furniture that I was for the first time I saw at the very end, because my parents, due to the way that they were affected by the Depression, were never able to afford anything else except that which we started with. So it never changed.

RB: Well, I get the impression of a not very prosperous childhood, but let me go back and ask something about -- I never asked the name of your mother before her marriage. What was her name?

RI: My mother's name was Carmen Waters.

RB: Carmen Waters.

RI: Yes. She was named for the Carmen of Bizet's opera because that was her father's favorite opera.

RB: What was his name, your maternal grandfather's name?

RI: He died before I was born, and to tell you the truth, offhand, I really couldn't say; I don't know.

RB: Do you remember your other grandfather?

RI: Yes, yes. He's already figured in one of my paintings -- the Highball on the Redball Manifest in the American show at the Museum of Modern Art was painted with that paternal grandfather a little bit in mind, not really very much. He was a locomotive driver on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and that Highball painting is a locomotive painting.

RB: It's very interesting since you're about to have this dual show with Richard Stankiewicz in a short time in the Walker Art Center. Did you know that his father, who died when he was an infant, was killed while working (this was his father) on the Pennsylvania Railroad?

RI: Is that right? Maybe my grandfather ran over him.

RB: It's possible. Well, you didn't tell me your grandfather's first name?

RI: That was Fred.

RB: Fred Clark. And where did he live?

RI: Originally, and then this is a little bit lost, I'm not too sure myself, but i think my father's family had come from the West and had returned to Indiana because there were frequent references to places like Texas and Kansas and Alabama and things like that. As a youth I think that was where he spent his younger years. I know my grandmother often spoke of setting type shortly after the Civil War period for a little Kansas newspaper.

RB: Oh, really, Your grandmother had a job of this sort? Did she influence your childhood? Your grandparents, did they ever live --- Did you ever live in their home?

RI: No. There was never very much proximity. They were always the people down on the farm that we went to visit on Sunday, and big chicken dinners and a heavy table with maybe twenty-five relatives all seated around it, or eating watermelons out under the trees by the pump, or this kind of rural Hoosier. . .

RB: Good old Hoosier tradition. Well, I take it, it was a big family or your father had lots of brothers and sisters?

RI: There were lots of brothers and sisters in that department.

RB: Then, you had a lot of first cousins and things of that sort, I suppose?

RI: I did, and I've lost track of all of them.

RB: I asked you if you had older brothers and sisters. Were you an only child?

RI: An only child.

RB: An only child. But you weren't particularly close then to any of your cousins of your own generation?

RI: Not really, because of this business of moving around so much. Most of the time I didn't live very close to them.

RB: Did anybody on either your father's or mother's side of the family have any relation to the fine arts in any way?

RI: None whatsoever.

RB: You are really the first artist in the family as far as you know?

RI: The first artist, and all of my early ambitions, which started at the age of about five or six, were immensely discouraged I was told before I

RI: even started into school that if I should persist in this ambition I'd be eating bean soup and living in a garret. And that's exactly what happened.

RB: This was from both your mother and father? Neither one was sympathetic?

RI: Neither one was sympathetic to art as a career. They were very sympathetic to my actual drawing and painting and encouraged me to do this, but they discouraged it as a possible profession.

RB: Well, do you think they were influenced by their own financial difficulties in the depression to have your material welfare in mind?

RB: Well, do you think they were influenced by their own financial difficulties in the Depression to have your material welfare in mind?

RI: I'm sure they were.

RB: I think that would really e the normal parental approach in this country to an artist and his career, wouldn't it?

RI: Of course.

RB: They had no friends I suppose who were artists?

RI: There was no connection with any cultural activity at all.

RB: Well, were either of your parents interested in music?

RI: No.

RB: Or literature?

RI: No. Very, very simple people with very simple interests.

RB: Well, you said you moved so many times. Now, how long in your birthplace? Did you remain in that town for long or did you move to other towns?

RI: Oh, towns, counties - the only common geographical distinction was the state of Indiana.

RB: So you lived over all of Indiana. Well, I would like for the record, if you could remember, to go through some of those actual moves. Did the process of moving and changing residence have any emotional effect on you as a child?

RI: I'm sure it must have. I'm sure it must have.

RB: You don't remember incidents in which you were disturbed over this?

RI: Of course. Particularly in reference to changing schools. I was always very unhappy about leaving one school and going to another school. Frequently, it would be a country school where either art wasn't taught art too, and she probably was more interested in music than she was in art, which always made me very unhappy.

RB: I would like to stick still for a moment to the pre-school period, though, and get that. . . I presume you didn't go to school till you were about age six?

RI: No, I started school when I was seven, Dick, because it turned out that ordinarily a child in Indiana would have started at six and it was decided that I had. . . was not particularly strong at that time and that I should be held back for a year. And I was. So therefore I started when I was seven, but I later made that up by skipping an elementary grade.

RB: Well, in that period before you went to school, how many homes did you have, do you think?

RI: Oh, that probably would have been something like ten or twelve.

RB: Actually that many?

RI: Yes, because the frequency tended to draw out a little bit as I got older. The more frequent moves were - took place when I was a young child.

RB: You attributed this to your mother's wanderlust?

RI: Yes, she couldn't bear to live in one house longer than a year.

RB: How did this affect your father's job-holding - whatever he was doing?

RI: Very adversely. It made for a very bad situation and therefore the whole marital aspect was probably not good.

RB: Well, I'm not sure. . . Did I ask you what jobs your father held during these first few years?

RI: He was usually connected with petroleum companies for some reason I'm not quite sure.

RB: Well, what sort of. . .?

RI: Of an administrative nature.

RB: An office worker? In other words, he didn't operate a gasoline pump?

RI: No. Only during the darkest time of the Depression I think he actually did. The original company that he worked for when I was born was one that went out of business because of the Depression and immediately after that I think he did operate a filling station. But this was a very short period and he was back in the administrative side shortly thereafter. Now, why he was always so concerned with this, when his own father had been a railroader and when in his early youth he had worked for railroads, I don't know. But he somehow got interested in gasoline and therefore some of my early paintings are gas paintings, you see.

RB: To what would you attribute this curious tendency of your mother's to want to move constantly? Was this some sort of poetic enthusiasm for change on her part, or inability to get on with the neighbors, or what sort of. . .?

RI: No. Nothing like that. My mother was of a very easy, outgoing disposition, who made friends very easily. It would have been my father who was the anti-social one. I really don't know. I almost think my mother had a kind of fetish and a fascination about architecture or about domestic structures themselves. She loved, for instance - most of my childhood I can remember we would travel miles and miles in the country just to find empty houses and explore them, you see, and as a child I couldn't have been more delighted, and my mother loved to find an empty house and go poking through it. And I think this carried into her own

RI: domestic life. She loved new houses, she loved to explore them and get acquainted with them, and then after doing so she got bored very fast and was soon looking for the next one. Now that this means psychologically i really don't know.

RB: I'm almost surprised that she didn't become a real estate agent.

RI: She should have.

RB: But that shows a kind of poetic or, I don't know that poetic is the word, but an imaginative side to her life. It's rather interesting, isn't it?

RI: Yes, but only of a limited and simple nature.

RB: You had a family car, I take it? and drove around. . .

RI: Always. The car, the car seemed to be the one... Another dominating and consistent aspect of my childhood, and that is it seemed that half my life was spent in the automobile. We were always driving some place for something. It was a very mobile childhood, that's for sure.

RB: You sound like a Steinbeck character at the moment. Were you particularly attracted toward cars, I mean did the American dream for cars, or was your father. . .?

RI: Obviously, my mother and father were. . .?

RB: Were very proud of their. . . What would they have?

RI: Well, at one time my father had his car and my mother had her car and of course this was very much going to poorhouse in an automobile because that's exactly where they both were, but they still both had their own cars, you see.

RB: Well now, to get back to these various houses. I take it they were rented, never owned?

RI: Not always. My family did purchases, oh, I think several houses, but there again, that didn't stop my mother. She went tearing right ahead.

RB: But they took the same furniture from place to place?

RI: Always it was the same furniture. It never changed, never changed. When my mother died I had the unhappy task of selling off some of whatever furniture was left and her washing machine, which she had had for twenty-one years, and which I remember all my life. It was a very wild and woolly primitive washing machine. It was auctioned off for twenty-five cents.

RB: What year was this?

RI: This was '49, I think. The year that I was discharged from the Air Force was the year of her death, the death of my stepfather and my entry into art school in Chicago. So '49 was a pretty heavy year.

RB: Crucial year. Well, we'll leave that for the future. I am interested, though, still to try and get a conception of something of this artistic, or lack of artistic, quality in your immediate environment as a child. What kind of furniture was this? Was it heavy, ugly furniture? Was this rather nice. . .?

RI: It was typical late 1920 borax, pseudo-Spanish, heavily-upholstered, heavily-gilded frames and heavily-gilded lamps with heavy lamp shades, and the whole bit. . .

RB: Well, the way you describe it, I have a feeling some of your painting is in revolt against the furniture that surrounded your youth. Your painting is certainly different from. . .

RI: It might very well be. My painting is that Phillips "66" sign which I saw all during my youth and which was the one most fascinating visual object in my entire youth because I saw that sign for years and years and years. This was a very large construction which probably was about ten stories high which towered over a phillips "66" gasoline station. And it was illuminated at night with neon. . .

RB: Where was this?

RI: In Indianapolis.

RB: In Indianapolis?

RI: Yes, because most of all these residences that I speak of were either in or near Indianapolis. I would never live too far away from the very center of Indianapolis.

RB: They were always suburban or urban, never actually real country?

RI: Yes. They even. . . It did include a farm. Of course, there was always my grandparents' farm and my aunts' and uncles' farms. All my father's people were really farm people to begin with. When my grandfather retired from the railroad, he went to a farm and, of course, he had spent his youth as a farm boy. But I had a calf and animals and a garden when I was a young boy, and it was not a working farm but it had those things that farms have.

RB: You're fond of animals. You have a cat on your lap at the moment. Did you have pets as a child, then?

RI: I always had dogs and cats and, as I say, calves and chickens and all those kind of things.

RB: Did you do any gardening?

RI: Yes, surely.

RB: As a small boy?

RI: Yes. Which is carried over now, because I still have -- I still have my garden.

RB: I'm trying to imagine whether this fascination with the Phillips "66" sign was purely in terms of its design or whether the fact that your father was in the gasoline business carried an association that interested you too. . .?

RI: Both of them.

RB: Double association.

RI: That's what fed me.

RB: And this in a way relates to your painting, doesn't it? Because they have formal value - the hard-

edge painting and then they have the extra associations of the words, and that is perhaps a connection there?

RI: It is, very vivid. That it should come out so much later is, of course, interesting, but subconsciously there it was all the time.

RB: Do you remember doing a lot of drawing as a small boy?

RI: Yes, surely.

RB: Crayon?

RI: Yes. I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old.

RB: You kept that? Or your parents must have kept it?

RI: No. I find that I was my own curator. My parents were never really quite that interested, and everything that I kept I kept myself.

RB: Well now, you've already mentioned that in changing schools you sometimes didn't get a very good art teacher. Can we go back now to the very beginning of your first schooling. What was the first school you entered?

RI: Well, interestingly enough, and, of course, of great interest to me, my first school was this small town in central Indiana called Mooresville.

RB: How do you spell that?

RI: M o o r e s v i l l e. This is about twenty miles below Indianapolis and it was nearby that I lived on the farm that I spoke of. . .

RB: Your grandfather's?

RI: No. My mother's and father's. My grandmother and grandfather for some reason had moved to Mooresville and they lived on a very short street called Lockerbie Street and it was into their house that my own mother and father later moved -- they had moved to a different house -- nd this was from the country. It turned out that there

RI: was a very narrow, steep country road that in the wintertime my father could not navigate in his automobile. It became so dangerous and so ice-covered that they found it necessary to move into the small town. Now, we were there, first of all, for my own health, but moving into this little town didn't make any difference about that. And it just so happened that Mooresville was the home town of John Dillinger, who was Indiana's most notorious citizen.

RB: Criminal.

RI: Yes, criminal. And I lived there when he was shot in Chicago where I later went to art school and actually saw his funeral.

RB: Well, what age?

RI: I was six or seven.

RB: Oh, yes. That's a vivid recollection there, of course.

RI: Very vivid, yes. And definitely it means that there'll be a Dillinger painting one day.

RB: Do I infer that you had at the age of six or seven a kind of romantic admiration for Dillinger, or you hated him?

RI: Oh, no, no. I didn't hate him. I didn't know anything about hating people. He was the man whose name was always at the top of the newspaper and he was the man that everybody was talking about.

RB: You don't remember your personal bias for or against?

RI: If I had one, I don't recall it now. No. I'm sure I. . . It was like cops and robbers. It was probably very exciting and that was about all.

RB: Do you recollect the first art instruction you had in school?

RI: Oh, surely, very vividly. My first grade teacher was a woman named Miss Coffin and which I am very interested in learning, finding out much later that this is the name which also appears in the first chapter of Moby Dick. And many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick - Coffin being a very famous Nantucket. . .

RB: Yes, I know.

RI: Whether she was related to that New England family I don't know: But she was a very sympathetic teacher and taught all the subjects. It was. . .

RB: She was the regular class teacher?

RI: Yes, she handled the art and music as well as arithmetic and reading and greatly encouraged me in my own art activities and at the end of that first year took some of my drawings and asked if she might keep them, that she wanted to hold these, so that one day when I became a famous artist, why she'd have them in her trunk, you see.

RB: Have you checked to find whether she has them in her trunk?

RI: That I haven't done. But it was a great -- I must say, a great incentive and a great spur.

RB: Well, it's quite clear from this that she did see in your work something superior to the rest of the students. That seems evident.

RI: I suppose so.

RB: How big a class was this, about twenty or something?

RI: Well, no, this was a large, this was a big room filled with students. Due to the fact that I was older than the regular first grade students, I was put into a wing of first grade in the second grade room, so that my first year's instruction took place in what was really the second grade room. And a year after that I skipped the second grade and went into the third grade at a different school.

RB: Did you feel any kind of humiliation at being behind the others in educational. . .?

RI: No, never. That never occurred to me.

RB: Well, it would just have been a small part of the curriculum, I suppose, to do these drawings and things like that?

RI: Oh, sure.

RB: But you particularly enjoyed this, I suppose.

RI: I drew at home, and these drawings, in fact, that she kept I suppose really were done at home and not in the classroom.

RB: She taught you to read?

RI: Yes.

RB: Was that something you took to easily, or. . .?

RI: School was always -- It came very naturally to me, Dick. I never had any difficulty in school.

RB: I forget why you were late in starting.

RI: Health.

RB: Yes, you mentioned your health. What was the trouble?

RI: I'm not too sure myself except that I seemed to be underweight and a little scraggly, and the doctor felt it would be better if I was outside of the industrial smog of Indianapolis and move to the country and postpone going to school for a year.

RB: You don't think they saw, say, incipient tuberculosis or anything like that. . .?

RI: I think it might have been considered that it was within the realm of possibility, but nothing ever developed so I can't say for sure.

RB: Well, during most of your school years you were normally healthy and strong?

RI: Yes, yes. There was never any. . . I never had any trouble in that way.

RB: And you got. . .in your relative scholastic standing, then, you were toward the top of the class, I take it, as a boy?

RI: Yes, yes.

RB: What sort of reading did you do in your early boyhood?

RI: Well, my reading, of course, was all orientated to Americana, of anything except American authors.

RB: You mean this was all that you knew of -- you say "of course" -- I mean it doesn't seem inevitable that it should be so concentrated. Or was it inevitable. . .?

RI: It turned out to be that way. I didn't become...Literature was never one of my most active interests. I was always primarily concerned with painting and I didn't discover, shall we say? world literature until I became older and on my own.

RB: Well, this becomes of interest in view of the fact that many of your paintings do contain quotations from American authors.

RI: Yes.

RB: I'm not sure -- do any of them contain phrases from non-American authors?

RI: Not at this point, and they probably won't, because that more literary aspect of my painting is probably already over with.

RB: This is a conscious rejection on your part of the literary aspect as such in painting?

RI: Possibly it's just that I feel my more successful paintings are those which don't become quite so involved with phrases. I prefer the single word.

RB: Yes. Well, nevertheless it has been a rather unusual feature of your paintings that they did contain these readily - understandable, direct references to aspects of American literature or history, like your painting Calumet - is it? - with the Indian tribes. . .

RI: Yes.

RB: . . . and all sorts of. . . In other words, I can imagine somebody doing a little essay on the reflections in your painting of American history and culture, you see. . . the sort of thing which you couldn't imagine so much in the painting of, say, of Hans Hofmann or all sorts of other artists, I mean. So this is why I want to go into this childhood thing more.

RI: Yes. But given the whole body of my work, those paintings really are going to represent a very small aspect of it, Richard, and I'm not pursuing that aspect.

RB: Yes. Well, that's, I presume going to be the case, although you might fifteen years from now revert even more heavily in that direction. We can't foresee. . .

RI: I doubt it, because this was the starting point, and I just don't think that's going to happen.

RB: Well, it's then established that this Hoosier childhood was not vastly absorbed in American literature and things like this. . . You didn't read Whitman on your mother's knee, or Longfellow by the fireside at the age of eight?

RI: I became acquainted with writers like Whitman and Melville and even Twain only when I got to high school, I'd say.

RB: Bob, did you have much interest in athletic events and so on as a boy?

RI: No, probably due to this scraggly condition of mine, athletics never was very much of a preoccupation.

RB: Was it compulsory or. . . You never went to private schools? You always went to public schools?

RI: Always to public schools. Always to public schools.

RB: Yes. And they varied, I gather, from what you said earlier, quite a bit in quality, as you moved from place to place?

RI: Tremendously, yes.

RB: Well now, you said you were upset over these changes. Was this because of the difference in teaching or because you were separated from friends that you made in these schools?

RI: Well, of course, there was the separation from playmates and so forth, but at this point I must admit I can't recall whether that was the main reason for my unhappiness. I suspect, and as I

RI: remember, it was really more the appalling difference in instruction and I really wanted to learn very badly and some of these schools were so bad I was aware of it, and I knew myself that I wasn't getting a very good education.

RB: Inevitably, you felt brighter than some of the other students, then, in certain of these circumstances?

RI: I suppose so.

RB: Well, when did you leave this. . . You spoke about this first teacher in this town. . . now where did you go from there? How long were you in that school?

RI: I was in the Mooresville school for my first grade, living part of the time in the town and part of the time in the country, which, the country meant long, long school bus rides over the kind of rolling - southern Indiana becomes rather hilly, and I used to have these long, beautiful rides through the country each day to school. Then the second year it was back to Indianapolis and it was back to an urban school - probably a much better school - but there were so many immediate moves on the part of my mother that my second grade was split up into about three different schools, and this was really. . .

RB: All in one year?

RI: All in one year.

RB: In the second grade, and you would only have been about eight at this time?

RI: Yes.

RB: Well, that would be very disturbing, I should think, and made your progress as a student hard.

RI: That was bad. But then from the third grade to the sixth grade was one of the few stable times of my childhood. My mother and father did buy a house and they did settle down a little bit more than they had theretofore. And I had those four years in one school, and this was Cumberland, Indiana.

RB: Cumberland, Indiana. How big a place is Cumberland?

RI: Even smaller than Mooresville. It's practically not much more than just a widening in the road, or it was at that time. Now Indianapolis has stretched out so far that it's probably almost incorporated into the city as a suburb. But at that time it was a very small town slightly east of Indianapolis and it had an old, nineteenth-century, towered, gabled, Victorian, red brick schoolhouse with a bell in the tower, and there it was that I spent four years and had a little bit of stability for a change.

RB: Which years were those in your life? What age were you?

RI: Well, I was probably between eight and twelve, something like that.

RB: There you formed some friendships, I suppose, with some of the fellow students?

RI: Yes, yes.

RB: Do you remember any of them now as people -- I mean. . .?

RI: Not very clearly, no, no. And I've never maintained any contact with any. . . I lost contact with them years and years ago.

RB: Anticipating chronology, but since you have chosen to name yourself "Indiana," one infers that you have a very strong liking for Indiana, a very strong attachment to it. Is that correct?

RI: I think I probably do. It's home and it's the place of most all of my most pleasant memories. That's not really the reason that I chose the name. I chose it because it was my birthplace. Whether I had lived there for twenty-one years or. . . seventeen it was. . .or whether I lived there for less, it wouldn't have made any difference. But I also liked the name. . .

RB: You mean as a sound?

RI: As a sound, yes.

RB: But obviously its connotations would have to be agreeable to you?

RI: They are.

RB: I mean, you couldn't have had in summation a childhood that you so hated that anything to do with Indiana would be displeasing to you and still call yourself that?

RI: I don't think so.

RB: But one wants to discover the extent to which you have - shall we say? a sentimental attachment to Indiana as a place. And if it exists as an attachment, is it focused on the landscape or on the character of the people particularly?

RI: Not the character of the people. I have divorced myself from Hoosiers pretty completely. People from Indiana have a peculiar way of talking which I lost. . . I don't know that I ever had it. . . but I lost it years and years ago. And, generally speaking, they're like my own family -- most of them are rather simple people with uncomplicated lives and I outgrew that a long, long time ago.

RB: Well, since we're on the subject of your name - I don't know that you've really said why you chose to abandon the name under which you were born and christened?

RI: Why did I choose?

RB: Yes.

RI: I suppose for one thing I was never particularly fond of the name, and one of the immediate reasons that I chose to make the change was that there were two or there artists practicing and exhibiting in New York with that name, and I found this very. . .

RB: Is that so? Robert Clark?

RI: Well, no, no, with the last name. I found this a very uncomfortable situation.

RB: I don't recall any named Clark myself.

RI: I remember seeing them in. . .

RB: Well, naturally you would be more aware of Clark just the way I'm aware of other people being named. . .

RI: These were not prominent people. But just seeing it upset me, that's all.

RB: Well, it's a relatively rare thing, I believe, for painters to take another name. More literary people seem to do it - or actors, or people of that sort, but I can't think of many twentieth-century painters. . .

RI: This is a. . .not twentieth-century painters. . .

RB: Well, Gorky is one.

RI: Yes. But this was a Renaissance preoccupation.

RB: As a matter of fact, now that I think of it, Larry Rivers has a different name.

RI: Yes.

RB: But his name is so very complex that for a practical man. . .

RI: Well, I went the other direction. I went from a simple name to a more complicated one.

RB: Well, it's nevertheless an easily-pronounceable and easily-recognizable name. . .

RI: By coincidence, yes.

RB: . . . which I should think would be actually helpful to you in identifying. . .I mean it's a less anonymous name than Clark.

RI: Much more individual.

RB: Yes. And that's perhaps basically the reason you wanted to have it.

RI: Exactly. I should like to be the only person with my own name and I think at this point I am. Probably won't stay that way long, though.

RB: Well, just to finish this subject off, to my mind it seems evident that your choice of the name does not imply so great an affection for the state of Indiana that you're ever likely to go back and live there.

RI: I might, I don't know.

RB: I mean you're not here suffering tortures at separation from Indiana as a state?

RI: Not at all.

RB: I think we should make an observation that it's now raining and that's what's happening - that it's leaking through the studio. Now, just to interrupt the youthful history we were discussing, would you like to say something about this studio we're in, because it's a fascinating place, and I was just made to think this by the fact that it does leak in the roof. Is this a place that is heated in winter?

RI: No, no, I provide my own heat, Dick, with a potbelly stove.

RB: So in a certain way it's not provided with all the comforts of. . .?

RI: None whatsoever. I've lived in New York for the last seven years without even so much as a shower, you see, which is very primitive for New York.

RB: You have a bathtub?

RI: I have an old country-style tub.

RB: This is a very old building which was formerly used for what?

RI: It was a ship chandlery for maybe half a century. It was at one time the marine works, which is a subject of one or two of my pieces of work actually. Before that it was probably a warehouse. It's about a hundred and fifty years old. And it was on the busiest and the largest of all of Manhattan's slips. And. . .

RB: What does the word "slip" mean? Does it mean a pier? This is a thunderstorm going on. . .

RI: A "slip" is that construction that a ship berths in, you see. It slips into place and docks, you see.

RB: Oh! The old sailing vessels then of course docked here. . .

RI: Yes.

RB: . . .because we are on Lower Manhattan on the side where ships don't come in now much, do they? You're very near a heliport. (Earlier noises were sometimes provided not by this thunder we're currently hearing but by the arrival of these helicopters.)

RI: Yes, that's right.

RB: That goes on all day long, I take it?

RI: Yes. That's a new development. They took one of the old abandoned ship piers and turned it into a heliport and it provides a taxi service to Idlewild, La Guardia and Newark airports, and on the weekends there is a small helicopter which takes people up over the island of Manhattan, which I have ridden on a couple of times myself.

RB: Have you?

RI: Yes.

RB: This in a sense is one of the most interesting sections in all New York City, I think, because of the fact that it. . .how far away are you from the Wall Street area - about four minutes' walk, or. . .?

RI: No, not that. First of all, Wall Street is uptown from me and it's just two blocks away from my. . .

RB: So it's got the center of New York finance and business a very short way away and has -- to get back to this old building, this recollection of the early life of New York City -- we have. . .is this floor made of. . .wide beams, isn't it, the old-fashioned wide beams, then you have here, is this concrete or wood?

RI: The whole floor was probably wooden planks originally but when it was turned from a warehouse into a ship chandlery the concrete floor was put in so that metal things could be manufactured on this floor. This is the top floor and it was used as a kind of shop.

RB: This was a shop? Well, now the walls are painted white, but they are brick with no plaster or anything and there are big crossbeams across the ceiling. It's very much in the - shall we say? great tradition of artists' studios, being rather picturesque. Did you find this place long ago, or. . .?

RI: I've been here for the past -- oh, close to six, going on six years, Dick. When I first came to the slip I took another building which had previously been occupied. . .

RB: YOu mean you leased the whole building?

RI: No, no, excuse me, I didn't mean to say that, but I took a top loft in a building that also had been the Marine Works. Just by coincidence both buildings on Coenties Slip where the Marine Works shops and that building was torn down in less than a year after I came. It was demolished along with three neighboring buildings, one of which was the studio of Jack Youngerman, and we were next-door neighbors for about three years -- another American painter from Kentucky.

RB: Yes, yes. Jack Youngerman is from Kentucky?

RI: Yes. We would have been neighbors originally and so now we were neighbors here.

RB: Well, this building has on the ground floor a Spanish bar, doesn't it?

RI: The Rincon d'Espana.

RB: Is it actually Spanish, or is it Puerto Rican?

RI: No, it is Spanish and it caters to the Spanish Lines, which is one of the few companies that still docks on the East River.

RB: Do those ships ply between here and Spain, or do they go to Cuba and South America?

RI: Well, I doubt if they go to Cuba now, but they certainly ply the South American route, surely.

RB: I'm asking some of these questions because this neighborhood, I think, has had its influence in a sense on your paintings like those which are named. . .or contain names that are rather picturesque, like Coenties Slip and Corlears Hook and so on. You have utilized this environment in your work, haven't you?

RI: Even more directly, say, for instance, my painting Rebecca comes from a Civil War slaver which certainly would have passed by Coenties Slip in its own day and this ship was captured by the British and the men were punished for their activities. The Year of Meteors concerns the Great Eastern, another ship which would have sailed up the East River. These historical references are a part of those literary paintings which I probably won't be doing anymore.

RB: No. But you must have read about those ships -- I'm not to imagine that you sort of met in the neighborhood old mariners, bearded old gentlemen that sailed on these vessels? You've brought in distinct historic reference through historical means, haven't you? I mean you didn't see these ships?

RI: No, no, of course not.

RB: So, but you were inspired to read up about this history, is that it?

RI: Well, they came down via American literature, Dick. The Year of Meteors is from a Whitman poem; Rebecca is strictly from historical reference; the Melville Triptych, which is a painting that includes those words you mentioned: Corlear's Hook, Coenties Slip, and Whitehall - that comes from Melville's Moby Dick, the first chapter.

RB: Yes. And your interest in Moby Dick perhaps has been stimulated by living in this particular environment. . .?

RI: No, no. Moby Dick preceded the slip.

RB: No connection?

RI: Moby Dick preceded the slip.

RB: Well, I would like to go on a little more, since we entered the subject about this neighborhood, and how it affects your thinking and your life. You wrote a piece which you showed me, a very nicely-written piece which will be published in the catalogue of the Walker Art Center show that you are about to have, which is in a sense a description of this areas -- is it?

RI: That's right. This is for the Stankiewicz-Indiana show. And in preference to writing about my work directly I chose to write about that which has influenced my work, and the slip has both been an influence and a very formative force in my painting.

RB: Well, there must be few places in the world that have quite these combinations of -- well, you get this - the modern financial world, the very up-to-date world so close during the daytime, you get the sound of ships, whistles, and you get these helicopters coming in; you have, of course, the Square; you have - what is that building that contains sailors? it it. . .?

RI: This is what we call the doghouse, it's the Seaman's Church Institute, which is a hostel for merchant seamen run by the Episcopal Church. And on the top of it is a lighthouse which shines at night and this is a memorial to the people who lost their lives in the Titanic disaster.

RB: Oh!

RI: So there'll probably be a Titantic painting one day, too.

RB: That's an interesting remark for you to make. I take it, the conception of certain of your paintings grows up slowly in you, you make a remark like that - there's a certain edge of a notion of an idea lodged now in your mind. . .

RI: A seed. . .

RB: A seed. In a couple of years from now this will -- or months --

RI: I can visualize or imagine doing a Titanic painting. First of all, because there is a lighthouse that shines through my skylights called "Titanic" and, secondly, I like the word "Titianc;" and, thirdly, "Titanic" means many other things besides ships and sinking and paintings.

RB: It seems to me each of your paintings must be conceived prior to its being painted.

RI: Very much so. Very much so.

RB: This, of course, ties in with your - I believe - disapproval of the more free-flowing, impulsive kind of Abstract Expressionism which in certain instances came into being without preconceived ideas of the ultimate painting. The artist simply painted. You don't have this approach ever, to your work?

RI: Hardly ever.

RB: Well, you couldn't very well, and just sort of throw it together, because. . .

RI: Certain things happen while I'm in the process of painting. There is room for a certain amount of change and improvisation, but to compare it with Abstract Expressionism would be very difficult.

RB: Well, what I'm actually in my own mind trying to figure out is when you make a remark like this "that there may be a Titanic painting," it is, of course, quite simple to imagine doing a painting with the word "Titanic" on it tomorrow or next year, or twenty years from now; but do you think the eventual painting "Titanic" is going to have a particular character formally or colors or shapes or whatever it is, more or less directly or, at least, subconsciously closely allied to the history of the Titanic and its sinking?

RI: Since my work is recently taking a figurative turn, Dick, and you haven't seen any of these canvases, it's very possible that there might be a ship in my Titanic painting.

RB: Ah! Well, this, of course, I hadn't foreseen. But what I am trying to establish is that each of these cases when you have an idea - you might call this a literary idea - some people would say that you would do a Titanic painting - I don't know whether that's a literary idea or not, but it's not purely a visual idea, is it?

RI: I prefer to think of it as verbal-visual, not literary.

RB: That's an interesting phrase. Is it one you have used often, verbal-visual?

RI: It's one I think about.

RB: Can you tell us a little about what you think about it - when you're thinking about verbal-visual?

RI: Well, I think I probably - what I am thinking about is the very elementary part that language plays in man's thinking processes and this includes his identification of anything visual and that is I'm sure that the word, the object, and the idea are almost inextricably lost in the mind, and to divide them and to break them down is not really - it doesn't have to be done. The artist has usually done it in the past. I prefer not to.

RB: Certain painters recently - people that I'm sure you know - have actually incorporated sound into their paintings. This would not --- Well, this you have not done yourself, first of all, have you?

RI: It's something that I haven't come to because I'm not very much given to mechanical dexterity but it is certainly something that I wouldn't necessarily scorn.

RB: Well, I'm trying to find out whether verbal-visual would include -- suppose it was very easy to do and you had a painting that repeated a certain phrase, every three seconds or something, in a beautiful voice; let's say, a great actress says, "Corlears Hook" or something from behind the canvas. Would this be an idea that you would like?

RI: I'd love it. Sounds like great fun.

RB: But is this really quite the same thing as verbal-visual? I mean this is adding sound. . .

RI: I know. That's not what I'm thinking of. Verbal, I don't mean audio. I mean just verbal.

RB: Yes, but you. . .

RI: I don't mean vocal.

RB: But you think there's an element -- of course, part of the element could be in an art is that within the mind one hears a sound, and I look at the figure '5", a painting that hangs in front of me now. Am I supposed mentally to say to myself the figure 5 U.S.A. - things like that? Or am I just to look at it visually?

RI: You may very well do that on first confrontation, Dick, but I am very much impressed and I have always been impressed how with a little concentration and a little mental exercise, if one concentrates long enough on a word or figure, it's very easy to lose the conscious grasp of what that is, and one can look at a word, and after concentrating on it for a little while, one has almost forgotten what that word is. And I should like in a way this to be a part of my work, too.

RB: Are there words that, say, that I might suggest to you for use in a painting that you would reject out of hand, and for what sort of reasons, if you did - that they didn't interest you, or that they had qualities opposed to what you're after; or would almost any word do?

RI: Well, first of all, I prefer - my first preference is one-syllable words. I happen to prefer the verb to the noun. I use the simple command words first of all. With the literary paintings where whole phrases were lifted from poems, that's something else. But as I say, I have lost active interest in that aspect of my work, anyway. I like short, terse words, and I like words - I suppose I sometimes think of their visual pattern. I am intrigued with certain letters, and other letters I'm not very intrigued by. This is not an important aspect of my work.

RB: No, but somehow one sees your work -- I have the impression that there are phrases and words that I would not encounter in your painting. Well, I don't suppose I would encounter a phrase used by Robert Motherwell very frequently in his paintings, "Je t'aime." You, I gather, would reject it partly because it's in French?

RI: I would probably reject it, first of all, because I think Robert Motherwell has probably pretty well laid claim to that.

RB: Well, yes, that obviously would exclude your using that precise one, but I mean some other French phrase of a similar size.

RI: I would ordinarily say yes, and I would agree with you, except I have already made an exception to that. One of my paintings is called Le Premier Homme and this is a painting which was inspired by Gargarin's space flight, and I suppose subconsciously in order not to make it too sympathetic to the Communist propaganda, I decided to call the painting by its French title. And it came directly from the cover of a French magazine, and I liked the phrase. I think most Americans, most English-speaking people, would recognize it anyway. So that it is not obscure.

RB: You saw it first on a French magazine cover? In other words, your eye, your visual reaction preceded in a sense your other comprehension of it? I don't want. . .

RI: These things come together in various ways.

RB: But I think it's one of the extremely individual features of your painting and probably important in some kind of analysis of your painting, your reaction, your verbal-visual responses, what you try to convey through them to a spectator. You really expect -- I mean if two people looked at your latest painting, let's say your latest painting is "Zip." Zip is now a new postal code number, I believe the most recent use of the word, as well as its other earlier use, so that two people might look at the painting, one would go no further than to think immediately - say, oh, of course, the new postal system, or something like this; the other person perhaps would fail even to think of that but would be looking at it in purely normal terms and say, oh, the colors in this are magnificent. Now, which of these two reactions of these two individuals would you be most gratified by?

RI: Well, I think I'd probably lean toward the person who appreciated its formal values first, Dick. However, obviously, I'm interested in the other aspect, too, and I imagine there's about ten different interpretations to "zip," and I would hope the person wouldn't get stuck on the postoffice terminology.

RB: No, well, it's because it is a new thing that they might think of it in that immediate present, and of course this is always one of those problems in using a thing like that; let's say, you did the painting three years ago before this new connotation existed. To some extent it's conceivable that the impact of the painting might be altered by a new use of this word that comes in through the postoffice a year after you finished the painting; then that might be an addition to the value of the painting, aesthetic value, or it might be a diminution in value. . .?

RI: Fortuitously, this may occur. That's out of my region altogether.

RB: Well, isn't this a problem, though, whenever you use words in a painting? I recall being told by a real estate agent that he was unable to lease a very fine apartment on the East River to a man who said, "I couldn't live here. Across the river I'd see that big Pepsi-Cola sign continuously and I lost so much money in the stock market in '29 in Pepsi-Cola, I couldn't live in this apartment." In other words, that was a purely individual, subjective reaction to the name Pepsi-Cola, which almost nobody else perhaps would have. An this is always a problem and it might arise in one of your paintings that certain words or certain individuals might have an unfortunate connotation. . .

RI: Very possibly. I can imagine that a person who is very fat and overweight wouldn't really be very interested in one of my "Eat" paintings at all, you see.

RB: This is, of course, not too serious a problem? It doesn't worry you very much?

RI: It certainly doesn't.

RB: My imagination picks on the incident of a great, important curator coming to select a painting for a museum to buy, and rejecting it because some personal reaction to the word in his own life that would make him reject it.

RI: There has been that kind of reaction, though, particularly to my "Eat and Die" paintings, and that is, of all my work they have been the last pieces that anyone seems to want to acquire.

RB: Well, I think it takes a bit of courage to buy and hang a large painting saying "Die."

RI: I should think it would be a great challenge.

RB: Yes Well, I mean to have guests come in for a nice dinner party and in the dining room there's this huge thing saying "Die" or something. Well, not every guest would like that, you see.

RI: Probably not, probably not.

RB: So this is what you mean by that sort of. . .

RI: But I imagine nudes have offended people for centuries but that didn't stop people from hanging nudes.

RB: Well, it comes down, doesn't it, to the question of the importance of subject matter in art, because even a word is in a sense subject matter, and its connotation, just like the connotations of -- well, somebody might not like railroad trains, and an important painting of a railroad train would therefore become unpleasant to them for that reason perhaps. . .

RI: Maybe so.

RB: There is an analogy. . .

RI: This is a chance I take.

RB: Speaking of railroad trains, in your youth your grandfather was a railroad man, you said. Did you travel a lot by railroad train?

RI: No, not very much because it concurred with the Depression. I remember as a child traveling to Chicago to see the 1933 Century of Progress exposition and my mother and father and I went there by rail with some sort of half-fare pass or something from my grandfather. But because of the Depression we just didn't do much of that kind of traveling at all.

RB: Now that you mention the Century of Progress, do you recall being particularly impressed by any special type of exhibit or thing? I never saw it, but was there a big art exhibit there?

RI: I remember nothing like that. But I do remember - again I remember some of the signs, and those were the things that impressed me most.

RB: What signs?

RI: Well, there was -- again I think it was a gasoline company; there was a large thermometer which towered stories and stories into the air. Specifically, I cannot - it's just that I recall these things; their actual names I don't have in my mind.

RB: These memories of signs are always accompanied by approval in your recollection, aren't they? I mean these were not things where you thought, oh, how hideous! like certain people, for instance, that detest seeing billboards along the countryside roads. You didn't have that kind of reaction? You remember these favorably?

RI: I always, whenever riding with my parents in the car on, shall we say? Sunday drives or trips, those were the thing I was always looking for. Now, I probably went through a period in high school under the prejudice or the pressure of instructors who probably did tell me how terrible it was that your beautiful highways should be cluttered with these unsightly objects, and I may have subscribed to that in an idealistic period at one time, but I certainly have forgotten about it now.

RB: Well, I gather that you were "pro" manifestations by signs. It comes out in your painting. It would be logical that you would have liked billboards, say, frequently.

RI: Yes, I think. . .

RB: I should ask you now - now that I think of it - what recollections of seeing art do you have as you grew up. I mean, there is a museum in Indianapolis. . .

RI: Yes, but I never - I don't recall ever visiting that museum until I was in, probably, high school, Dick. I mean this was the extent, this is an indication of how indifferent my own family was regarding things like this. Probably my first exposure to art besides the chromos in my mother's house was, oh, Life magazine and the color. . .

RB: Photographs of. . .?

RI: Yes. The color reproductions of American regional painting which was very much in domination at that time. People like Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and works of this school.

RB: Did these please you. . .to see them?

RI: Oh, I probably thought they were great, yes.

RB: You don't remember as such?

RI: Oh, yes, sure. I thought they were marvelous.

RB: Well now, this is, of course, a very interesting fact of your childhood. Had you been living, let's say, in The Hague or in Amsterdam it's most unlikely that you would have failed, before the age of twelve or thirteen, to see a great many great works of art. Isn't that so? But there in Indiana, although there was a museum, seeing fine arts which was not part of the life of a. . .

RI: I had none of that. No, definitely not. And the museum in Indianapolis is not that strong on master works either, as far as that goes.

RB: And I presume that none of your family friends were owners of great works of art?

RI: No, of course not.

RB: So that - do you recall the age at which you decided you would like to be an artist?

RI: Oh, I decided when I was five or six years old that I wanted to be an artist.

RB: As early as that?

RI: Yes. And announced this to my parents. Now I had some alternative interest as a child, and I think in view of some of my more recent work rather interesting. First of all, I had may old relatives at that time, aunts and uncles and grandparents who were dying off, and it seems that half of my childhood was spent attending funerals, I mean, from John Dillinger's on down. And now that I should be painting "Die" paintings, it's rather peculiar.

RB: Did attending funerals upset you, or. . .?

RI: Oh, no, not at all.

RB: It was a festival?

RI: No. I was very much impressed that during the Depression there was one profession which wasn't suffering at all and that was funeral directors, and as a child I had an alternative ambition, and that was to have a funeral home, you see. But a very, very, lavish gorgeous funeral home, you see.

RB: As a matter of fact, only last weekend I was talking to an acquaintance of mine who in high school desired to be a funeral director. I was very astonished at this personally, because it's the last thing I would wish to be. And he said that it then seemed to him a very glamorous kind of career. I gather that your reaction was somewhat the same?

RI: Well, I imagine that it was certain exotic flavor to it because it was, first of all, a subject, when broached to grownups, they didn't want to talk about it, and therefore it had a kind of forbidden quality which was very glamorous.

RB: Well, that introduces an interesting possible line of approach to your character. How rebellious and impudent were you as a child?

RI: Very, very. Mischievous.

RB: The word "impudent" was used by Mr. Swenson, so. . .

RI: Yes, yes. I was always being criticized for my mischievousness. And often on my report cards there would be notations of this.

RB: Were you a practical joker?

RI: No, no, but I just didn't - I wasn't always too submissive to authority, I suppose.

RB: Deportment marks were low?

RI: That's right. That's right.

RB: But this, I suppose, was perhaps an aspect of you imagination rather than a kind of bitter rebellion?

RI: Well, not as a child, I'm sure.

RB: What do you mean "not as child?" You mean it was. . .?

RI: There was no bitter rebellion as a child, of course.

RB: No, no. There was later?

RI: More so than during that time.

RB: We'll get to that later on, but. . .We don't want to draw your childhood in terms of too great sentimentality, but let's see if we can get more of the essence of it. Were you a leader among your playmates?

RI: No, I wouldn't say that. I was a loner. I was a loner, not a leader.

RB: Were you molested particularly by them?

RI: Not particularly.

RB: And this kind of mischievousness that you were guilty of, did that win you the admiration of your contemporaries, or were you a nuisance to them as well as to adults?

RI: I don't think that I gained anything in that respect from my fellow children. I would say that was not the reason, as you suggest, that was not the reason I was mischievous at all. It was just a spirit and an independence which had nothing to do with the group at all.

RB: I would have thought since you went so often to funerals that one of the opportunities to be particularly impudent and mischievous would be by misbehaving while part of the family audience at a funeral, but I suppose this didn't happen?

RI: I don't think my mischievousness ever took exactly the pattern of misbehaving in that sense. I was not an unruly child, I was a very well-behaved child. My mischievousness manifested itself in other ways.

RB: Now, to get back to this determination to be an artist. Did you think of it in terms of being an illustrator or of fine art artist, or commercial artist, or didn't you break it down to these alternatives?

RI: Well, as far as I can remember, Dick, it had nothing to do with making it into any kind of commercial career because I probably didn't know anything about commercial art. When I was moved to desire to be an artist I was looking at reproductions of paintings, not advertisements or anything of that nature.

RB: Did you do any copying of those pictures, photographs you saw in Life, or things like that?

RI: I think I did. I think I did. In fact, one of the things that my first grade teacher kept was a scene from Currier and Ives of people skating on the ice. I can still vividly remember that.

RB: Do you imagine that you did this with an effort to reproduce it precisely or whether you did it freely and making your own adaptation?

RI: I imagine that my intent at that time was to make it as much like the original as possible, in that any kind of real creativity was not a part of my curriculum in those days. Education was pretty still and pretty formal, not at all inspire, and I was affected by. . .

RB: Of course, when you moved back and forth from these various schools, were the fundamental subjects more or less continuous? that is to say, you might have missed American history or Greek mythology or algebra or something through merely being shifted around. Or did all these schools have pretty much the same curriculum?

RI: All the important, or shall we say? the most important education took place in high school, Dick, and that - all of my high school, luckily, was in one school. I was not shifting around in the school, I was living in different houses but I was able to stay at the same school.

RB: Yes. Tell us where you went to high school, what city or town?

RI: This was Indianapolis. The high school was Arsenal Tech, which is essentially a tech school - technical - but it is also a very large school which offered a very wide range of subjects. In my last year - in my senior year in high school I spent, oh, between two-thirds and four-fifths of my time in painting classes, you see. And this wouldn't have been possible in the average American high school.

RB: No, that surprises me. Were you not obliged to have, say, a minimum of science, of languages, and athletics?

RI: One was obliged, but I satisfied those requirements before my senior year.

RB: Tell us, for instance, what the language obligations that you faced were?

RI: There were no language obligations. It was not a requirement, but it just so happened that I took four years of Latin. And that was my own preference.

RB: You did that voluntarily?

RI: Yes.

RB: Took Latin, but you took no modern languages?

RI: No, I didn't.

RB: Did you ever later?

RI: No, no.

RB: I'm curious. No requirement for modern languages at all. Now, what about the requirements for science?

RI: Oh, I think it was one year of one science, and that happened to be physics in my case, which I satisfied half of it, in a summer school course, just so it wouldn't interfere with my painting in the senior years.

RB: Did you do well in mathematics?

RI: I did all right in mathematics. It was one of my least-favorite subjects.

RB: Well, how did you get concentrated so early then on painting? We've sort of skipped from that first teacher. Can you remember some of your other painting teachers?

RI: Actually, it's a big gap, Dick, from that first instructor, who was very sympathetic, and a very warm, human teacher. There were a number of years in grade school when the teachers all run to gether. Their personalities were really lost. They were - particularly as far as my interest in art went - they provided almost nothing. Then there were two years in junior high when I had no art instruction at all, which made me very desperate to get to this particular high school that I mentioned.

RB: This is before you entered Arsenal?

RI: Yes, yes. This is junior high. I had no art instruction for two years.

RB: What ages would you be at that time?

RI: Junior high? Oh, I suppose that's something like twelve, eleven, twelve, something like that. And I knew about the reputation of this school because I had relatives who were in contact with the school. And its advantages were well-known to me. I knew that i could major in art in this school and the last year was practically what you'd call pre-college.

RB: In other words, this was not a high school that you automatically, because you lived in a particular area, would have attended? This was one of city-wide scope?

RI: No. I made a personal sacrifice to attend this school, in that by that time my mother and father had been separated and divorced and remarried, and in order to attend this school i moved from a sympathetic home, which was my mother's and stepfather's to an unsympathetic home, which was my father's and stepmother's home.

RB: Do you mind, for the record, stating when they were separated, at what age, or year. . .?

RI: Back, earlier, when I was probably in about the fifth or sixth grade of school.

RB: And you were awarded to you mother, I take it?

RI: There was no awarding. It was all very informal, and there was never any court action.

RB: But you did live with your mother then more or less in that early period?

RI: I lived with my mother until I entered high school and then I moved to my father's so that I could attend. . .

RB: Yes. That you just said, but I want to go back now biographically. What was the name of your mother's new husband?

RI: His name?

RB: Yes.

RI: His name was Foster Dickey.

RB: D i c k e y?

RI: Yes. And he's dead.

RB: What was his career? What was his. . .?

RI: He was a person of very little education, Richard, and most of his life was very menial - menial kind of jobs, actually.

RB: Well, I was just trying to imagine or find out whether he and his personality or character or tastes had any direct influence on you?

RI: None at all. His profession was -- excuse me, his occupation was a baker, and before he died he and my mother operated a bakery in a small Indiana town.

RB: He had no children of his own?

RI: No, no.

RB: So that there was no change - I mean, you didn't cease to be an only child? You continued. . .?

RI: No. Same proposition.

RB: But you said this was more sympathetic, this was because you - your mother and you were mother sympathetic? or was he somebody that you got on very well with?

RI: I say this more from the "step" angle than from the mother and father angle. My father was sympathetic. However, I had a very unsympathetic stepmother. . .

RB: Oh, your father's new wife was. . .

RI: . . .and a very neutral stepfather who gave me no personal resistance such as my stepmother did.

RB: Well, may I then inquire her name, your father's second wife?

RI: I don't recall what her own name might have been. Her first name was Sylvia.

RB: And she had children of her own?

RI: Yes, she had a daughter and so for over a period of about two years I had a stepsister.

RB: So when you entered Arsenal High you went to live with this stepmother, Sylvia?

RI: Yes, that's right.

RB: With a daughter. And she was not somebody you could like? I mean, she was. . .?

RI: At the beginning I liked her very much. She was a more educated woman than my own mother, a more sophisticated woman, a woman that I could have admired more than my own mother, but in a very short time the step-relationship began to manifest itself. . .Jealously in regard to myself. My sister was not an excellent student in school, and I was, and this made for a bad situation.

RB: Was she much different in age from you? The stepsister?

RI: No, no. Very close.

RB: Very close. So that you -- she also went to this school?

RI: Yes. We were students there at the same time.

RB: I see. And this you think led to difficulties?

RI: This was part of it. This was part of it.

RB: Causing you unhappiness, I suppose?

RI: Oh, a great deal, yes.

RB: But, to what extent was this stepmother educated?

RI: Well, I'm not saying that she was well-educated, but she was, shall we say, a more intelligent woman than my mother was.

RB: But she would not introduce any enlargement of your cultural experience?

RI: Oh, none, none.

RB: Well, so you made this sacrifice then. In the summers, for instance, did you go back to live with your own mother?

RI: No, there was nothing like that. Part of the agreement -- I had always seen my father on a basis of weekends and that's how I got to know my stepmother, and on that basis my stepmother was always very friendly and I had nothing but good times with her, but when I came to live with my father and stepmother, one of the stipulations was that I would cease to ever see my mother again, you see. That was one of my stepmother's stipulations.

RB: She made that stipulation?

RI: Yes, yes. So therefore immediately a bad condition existed and as soon as my - not as soon - but my mother realized that she was never going to see me again unless she did something, and eventually she moved into the city of Indianapolis so that I might be encouraged to return to her household and after two years of this unpleasantness with my father and stepmother. I returned to my mother's house and finished my high school.

RB: Living with your own mother?

RI: Yes, living there.

RB: But I would have thought then when you first left her home, she might have been very upset to have you go to this. . .

RI: Probably was. Probably was.

RB: . . .but this didn't make an emotional impact on you? I mean, you don't remember. . .?

RI: It did. It did. But as far as I was concerned I'm afraid the schooling came first, you see.

RB: And since she didn't want you to be an artist, I don't suppose she was highly flattered by that motivation.

RI: Oh, she didn't not want me to be an artist, but it's that I was always discouraged because they didn't understand that an artist could provide for himself that was. . .

RB: Yes. Were your respective parents married almost immediately after their divorce, each of them, or was one. . .?

RI: It was within a year or two's time - I can't even remember that.

RB: Well, you don't remember living with your mother while she was a lone woman sort of. . .?

RI: Oh, of course, of course, yes, I do.

RB: Well, now tell us a little more about the high school experience itself. Who was your art teacher there?

RI: Well, I had a different instructor for the first two years each term, which meant two different instructors each year. Then the last two years were almost exclusively under the instruction of a little, marvelous old lady named Sarah Bard. . .

RB: B a r d?

RI: B a r d. And whether she is still alive I'm not really sure at this particular point. She had a fairly successful career of her own. She was a watercolorist and, oh, won all kinds of prizes and so forth, which. . .

RB: Locally?

RI: Yes, which greatly impressed her students. And we were all very much in awe of her and I was very much in awe of her, and she was a great character and a terrifically-inspiring instructor. And she alone was responsible for my decision to go to the Art Institute in Chicago.

RB: What sort of recollections do you have of Miss Bard's own painting?

RI: Well, out of her own wisdom, Dick, she didn't really let us see her own work. There was one exhibit of her watercolors in Indianapolis at a - at what would be the equivalent of Indianapolis's only gallery (it was an art supply store), and so I did see them and at that time I was very impressed by them. They were very accomplished, beautiful watercolors. . .

RB: Landscapes?

RI: Yes, of course. She came from the East, and so much of her work was the seacoast and things like that, piers and boats, and I did and I did a great deal of watercolor work myself so I was immensely concerned.

RB: What I'm trying to find out is whether Miss Bard was in any sense a disciple of any particular school of art, whether. . .?

RI: Only American realism.

RB: She would have liked Winslow Homer, say?

RI: Winslow Homer was the figure she talked of mostly. To her he represented the ultimate in watercolor technique from the American standpoint. However, Charles - or rather John Marin she held in the highest esteem. Much of my interest in art from the really serious standpoint was her discussions every day on the history of art and the current American scene at that time.

RB: Well, that's what I was wondering, what she emphasized in the history of art, what these influences at this stage in your career were?

RI: She covered the whole range.

RB: Greek art? And Renaissance art? And all these things?

RI: Yes.

RB: Well now, what predilections do you recall -- if you don't recall them, I mean -- but I was wondering if any particular school of art, or aspect of art at that early stage stood out in your affections?

RI: Well, first of all, the ancient or Renaissance didn't really interest me very much because of the remoteness of the whole period. Her special interest was from French Impressionism on up into the current scene, the modern French and the modern American.

RB: Well, let's see, what year would this be, roughly speaking?

RI: This was the early '40s.

RB: I was in high school during the war.

RB: What are your recollections of the outbreak of war? I mean, did you have any feeling of closeness to this problem, or -- you were there in the Middle West, as I as a New Englander think of it, which was certainly in 1940 believed to be strongly against participation of United States in the war. Did you get involved emotionally in any of that question of. . .?

RI: There was an isolationism, yes, yes. My family, I imagine my father and mother were probably isolationistic and therefore I wasn't.

RB: Automatically, you had a different point of view?

RI: Yes, yes.

RB: Well, were you pro-Allied or pro-German?

RI: I really don't think I could have been much else but pro-Allied at that point. I don't recall having any. . .

RB: It is reported that Mr. Philip Johnson, whom I believe you were conferring with yesterday, was a very ardent pro-German. I don't know whether this is true. Did you know that? or pro-Hitler, perhaps before the war began.

RI: Well, you see it so happened that in Indiana there was a great Fascistic organization of people called "Gray shirts" or "Black shirts" and some of these people were sent to prison during the war. This, however, all received very unfavorable press and never, never was very attractive to me.

RB: Well, I was trying to imagine whether your imagination was deeply affected by the world scene at that time. The world scene seemed to be in a very perilous condition indeed.

RI: I think it was. I was very much taken up with world events and i think I studied them, and in high school toward the end of my junior year, war was coming to a close and I was very much caught up with the UN, and the formation of UN, and the activities of -- I had a very - I don't remember her name - but I had a very intelligent and enlightened instructor who was very liberal and very sympathetic to all the activities of that time, and I leaned in that direction myself, I suppose.

RB: Had you at that age -- perhaps you wouldn't because the war was going on -- your generation couldn't opt to go to Europe, for instance. I mean, I was wondering if you had ambitions when you were sixteen, seventeen, to travel in Europe and things like that?

RI: There was no thought of that, because that was the war.

RB: You couldn't. Yes. But your art education at that stage, I'm wondering how much, for instance, Oriental art figured in this?

RI: None.

RB: None at all?

RI: None at all.

RB: It was -- would you say American or European art had the stronger. . .?

RI: At that time I think it was American. The American school of realism, as I said, Demuth, Grant Wood, Sheeler, Thomas Hart Benton, Curry, all these people I found very fascinating and very. . .

RB: You did like their work?

RI: . . .I thought very capable. Now I would have great reservations.

RB: Yes. But we're speaking solely of this period when you were in high school. I have a feeling, though, you did not see the originals of any of these?

RI: I doubt if I did.

RB: Do you recollect your first visit to a museum, an art gallery?

RI: Oh, my first, no, but it would have been during my high school years at Tech.

RB: You would have gone to the John Herron?

RI: Yes, yes, and I attended Saturday life drawing classes there in my last year so that I became very - I knew the museum very well.

RB: I don't know the quality or range of its collection.

RI: It's a small collection and there are some good pieces, including the French school, but my orientation, I must say, was American even then.

RB: Well, specifically of this group of then contemporary painters like Sheeler and Benton, or some of the older people like Winslow Homer and. . .

RI: Well, due to the influence of Miss Bard - yes, Winslow Homer. I never was very much exposed to his oil paintings, more just his watercolors, but other figures like Walt Kuhn and the Ashcan School and so forth, these became very familiar through reproduction and so on. Reginald Marsh. . .

RB: You liked these people, then?

RI: Oh, yes, sure.

RB: Were there any particular highly-touted artists at that time whom you did not approve of? For example, was the art of Picasso and that group called to your attention, and did you reject it?

RI: I was very familiar with the European scene, I mean as familiar as one could become through reproduction and so forth, but to tell you the truth, Dick, I can't recall now exactly what my attitude was then.

RB: Well, it's not important if you don't recall it...

RI: Probably the art was so sophisticated, the French art, that it was just a little bit beyond my ken altogether.

RB: Well, I just thought it might be interesting if you have any strong feelings that you still remember either for or against any particular artists that were well-known at that time. . .

RI: No, the whipping boy probably then, as maybe he still is, is someone like Salvador Dali and he's the person that everybody would attack and oppose, shall we say? at art school or high school. . .

RB: You mean your generation then?

RI: Yes.

RB: Was very much anti- not only Dali but the rest of the surrealists. . .

RI: Surrealists, yes.

RB: Well, it was, shall we say? probably just a little bit too sophisticated for a high school kid at that point, in Indiana, at that time.

RI: Yes, I suppose that would have been quite prominent contemporary aspect of art then.

RB: Well, it was; it was in the American scene.

RB: Yes.

RI: He was always getting a great deal of publicity.

RB: Can you say something about the character of the work you yourself were doing as a high school painter?

RI: Well, first of all, in high school at that time, (I imagine it is very different now) we were not allowed to work in oils unless it might have been the last year, and I did my first oil painting at the Art Institute in Chicago. So obviously I didn't take advantage of that freedom. Watercolor, I thought was my medium and I used to go out on weekends and paint landscapes around Indianapolis and even had a one-man show while I was still a senior in high school.

RB: How did you arrange that?

RI: Well, there again, as I said, there was this very active art department. There probably were six or eight instructors in it and they had a very, a fairly high sense of purpose, and they encouraged this sort of thing.

RB: Where was the show held - in the high school?

RI: There was a show in the high school; there was an exhibition area; and then there was a show at this local art store that I spoke of.

RB: You mean you had a show at the. . .? Well, did many other, I mean, was this a fairly unusual thing?

RI: Not unusual. Indianapolis has its cultural scene, too. There are annual art exhibits and so forth. The local department store has one and things like this, but, no, the art department at this high school was big enough in itself that there would always be five or six people who would more or less, shall we say? rise to the top, and these people were fairly professional and very interested. They were interested in exhibiting; they were interested in showing their work, and I was one of them.

RB: What, do you remember, were the themes? These were landscapes largely? Had you any particular aspect of landscape that. . .?

RI: I was very interested in - and I think I was influenced by much of the work that I mentioned just a little earlier, industrial aspects of Indianapolis were the things that fascinated me most, factories, railroad crossings, grain elevators, things like that, and this was the influence of people like Sheeler and. . .

RB: Well, I was just thinking Sheeler, of course, painted flatly. Did you. . .?

RI: No, I. . .

RB: With watercolors you wouldn't. . .

RI: No. Subject-wise I was influenced, but at that point - I - was not interested in flat pattern.

RB: These were primarily intended to be realistic and have a kind of social massage in the sense that they were industrial rather than. . .?

RI: I doubt if I though they had any social message and I doubt if I was putting any message into them. I was merely observing those things which fascinated me most and that is industrial scenes were more complicated and more intriguing to me than, shall we say? landscape with trees, or. . .

RB: There also might have been, I don't know, but it might have been easier of access. Did you have your own car or anything at this time?

RI: No, I had a bicycle and I used to go out on my bicycle and take my kit of watercolors. However, the campus of this particular high school - this is an old Civil War arsenal in Indianapolis and it was situated on a very landscaped campus of seventy-five acres with even a little virgin forest in one corner, so that there was ample opportunity to paint trees and landscapes if I wanted to.

RB: Yes.

RI: But I didn't prefer. . .

RB: So it was actually a preference, not a convenience?

RI: No, not at all.

RB: Did other friends of yours go out with you, or did you. . .?

RI: No. This was very much a one-man - and I might say, too, that, shall we say? living on the other side of the tracks may have had something to do with my preoccupation with industrial things in that we never lived very far away from the gas works and the railroad yards. We were not miles out in some pleasant residential community.

RB: No. You were not suburban with gardens and things?

RI: No, not at that point.

RB: Well, that's interesting. Are these in existence still - these watercolors?

RI: They are and they're probably stored in somebody's attic or basement in Indiana right now.

RB: You haven't seen them recently?

RI: No.

RB: I wonder how you would evaluate them from your present point of view?

RI: I wouldn't have much evaluation of them. They'd be pretty student-wise, I would imagine.

RB: Well, what was the actual year of this exhibit, these one-man shows -- you've given the impression of two one-man - one in the school and one in an art store?

RI: Yes, I'm not too sure about that myself now, Dick. It probably would have been my last year at Tech, which would have been in the 1946, 1945-1946.

RB: Well, was this a rather exciting experience for you?

RI: Yes, I thought it was very exciting, which meant clippings in the newspaper and photographs and things like that.

RB: You did get publicity of a sort?

RI: Yes.

RB: Any sales or were there. . .?

RI: Yes, I had my first sale when I was in high school and it was a watercolor rendition of an old country - and this was Mooresville - grain elevator which was situated right across the street from my grandmother's last house.

RB: And somebody who was a stranger or a member of the family bought this?

RI: This painting was exhibited in Scholastic, which you know is a national society to show high school and grade school work.

RB: Is that the Scholastic magazine?

RI: Yes, yes, connected with that. It was exhibited in the Scholastic show and one of the ladies in charge of the activity, I think, bought it for something like ten dollars.

RB: That must have been quite a lift to your spirits.

RI: Oh, it was very exhilarating.

RB: Were you - I take it you didn't have much money during high school - did you feel rather deprived? Did you have jobs?

RI: I was. Yes, I worked in the evening after school.

RB: Doing what?

RI: I started out being - delivering poultry; then I became a Western Union telegraph messenger. I became an advertising copy boy for a local newspaper, and when I left, when I finished just before I went into the Air Force I was a dispatch boy for the morning newspaper.

RB: Oh, this opens a whole new field of inquiry.

RI: Yes, it opens an alternate interest of mine. In high school I became very interested in journalism and for a very brief period even toyed with the idea of taking up journalism. I don't quite know, I think this was mainly because of the tremendous influence of the journalism teacher. She was a marvelous teacher and, shall we say? Moulder of young people, and her manner was infectious, she could get anyone interest in journalism. And so I fell under her sway.

RB: You might have become a newspaper reporter or something of that sort?

RI: Possibly, possibly.

RB: Probably this was. . .

RI: But when things like scholarships came up I won a scholarship to John Herron and I didn't win a scholarship to a journalism school so that my preference had already set me toward that. . .

RB: This scholarship to John Herron was for an art class?

RI: I had a life drawing scholarship during my last year at Tech but this would have meant the first year of my art school which would have meant staying in Indianapolis and I was very much opposed to that idea. I wanted to get away from home and I wanted to enlist in the Air Force, which I did, and become eligible for the GI Bill of Rights, which gave me five years of free schooling.

RB: So in other words, you never took up this scholarship?

RI: No. I dropped it. It went to another person.

RB: Well, let's go back for a moment to some of those jobs. Why did you change to so many - for better wages, or. . .?

RI: Better job, better wages.

RB: When was the first one? How young were you when you had your first job?

RI: Just a freshman in high school.

RB: You didn't have a job really until you went to high school?

RI: No. And this was an idea of my stepmother's. One of the reasons why I was not very pleased with my stepmother. She felt that I shouldn't be idle so much, that I was doing a little bit too much reading and studying and that I really should be making some money, because she remembered in her youth that that's what children did, you see.

RB: Were you allowed to keep and use this money, or did you have to contribute it to the household?

RI: Actually, I was allowed to keep and use it. I didn't have to pay -- maybe toward the end of my stay with my father and stepmother I had to pay something like board, but all the money that I saved eventually went back to her because I had deposited it in a bank and my father wanted to buy a house and I gave the money to them for that purpose.

[PAUSE]

RB: This is Richard Brown Baker resuming the interview with Robert Indiana. Today's date is September 18, 1963. Mr. Indiana has had his thirty-fifth birthday since we talked last and he is also celebrating, you might say, the publication of - I think you told me it's the first magazine reproduction in color of one of your works.

RI: That's right.

RB: The September 20, 1963 issue of Life magazine, which will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, contains an article on successful sellout shows of last season and it features a painting - what is the name of the painting of yours that is reproduced?

RI: It's the dietary, Richard, which is actually half of a diptych, the other half is the Eateria, and the painting really wasn't meant to be separated in the way that it was, but the other half is owned by Hirshhorn and. . .

RB: This one belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Maremont of Chicago, I think?

RI: Yes.

RB: Who have a very distinguished collection, I believe. . .

RI: A very large collection.

RB: A large one. Of course, it must be small compared to Joe Hirshhorn's, so with the other half apparently lost. . .I wanted to tell you something and I'm telling you this is in connection in a sense with that bit of publicity that is just coming to you at the moment, because it has occurred to me that your former teacher, whom you spoke about, Miss Sarah Bard, would not know about you, perhaps, because you are no longer bearing the name that you had as a student, and assuming she is alive, and I think she is alive because a 1962 edition of Who's Who in American Art lists Sarah Foresman Bard as living at 215 West Walnut Lane, Philadelphia 44, and I think this is the same woman because she won awards at the Hoosier Salon in '29, '31, '34 and '36, which is. . .

RI: It is. . .

RB: . . .so she evidently - apparently she was born in a town in Pennsylvania and now lives in Philadelphia.

RI: It is the same woman.

RB: Curously enough, I looked for you in this same volume an you are not listed in it. I bring this up merely to point out how new your fame, which far surpasses hers, already is, in a sense. And I wondered if you have any worries or observations or remarks to make about how it has felt to be within the space of two or three years somebody in quite eminent collections like the Hirshhorn and the Maremont collections and shown in the Museum of Modern Art and publicized in a variety of magazines.

RI: Well, I think the difference there, Richard; is those are not the qualifications for being accepted in a publication like Who's Who in American Art.

RB: That's not so important. I think that's not a very well-edited magazine. I don't mean a magazine - I mean a reference work. One thing I've noticed in looking -- one thing they have managed to miss are most of the more eminent artists. A few years ago they didn't have Franz Kine, for instance. But on the other hand, it is sometimes said in their defense that artists have not bothered to fill in the form which has been sent to them and therefore they haven't published them. You may have received a form, or you may not have.

RI: I haven't and I don't really expect to receive one.

RB: Well, you should in the next edition, I'm sure, but you see they operate - they have probably twenty or thirty thousand artists listed in this volume and it's very little use, I'll tell you, as a reference work, except for people who have won prizes like your former teacher, Miss Bard.

RI: Yes.

RB: That kind of people is very abundantly documented.

RI: That I haven't done, you see.

RB: Well, but in the future, I'm sure, the next edition - unless the editor is completely asleep - Robert Indiana will be invited to contribute the biographical facts. There's no doubt of that. I only mention this to show you, if one were looking you up, I mean in a way, according to the editor o this book, she - Miss Bard - is a more established artist than you are, but actually as of today I think I could say without ever knowing her work that her reputation presumably was a very limited one, and yours is in the category of a national reputation, I think, at the moment. And I just wondered how these feelings might have come up in you as you respond to this recognition.

RI: Well, probably I'm not - I don't feel very much about it because the publication doesn't mean anything to me at all, Richard.

RB: In Life magazine?

RI: No, no, the - Who's Who in America.

RB: Well, you're not in there. I'm talking about the other side of it - the fact that you are somebody who is receiving publicity. I'm trying to find out how this has reacted upon you.

RI: I guess it hasn't really, I haven't thought very much about it.

RB: Well, that's probably true but it seems rather deadpan, if I may say so, in the face of rather exciting developments.

RI: I would say my enthusiasm would be qualified by the article itself and, you probably saw it, you can see what else was reproduced and therefore. . .

RB: Well, I'm not speaking only of one specific article. I'm speaking of the combination of facts that I've already mentioned to you a moment ago that has changed you from being somebody known in 1960 only to your personal circle, I think, whereas today I presume one could go to the art faculty of some art school out in New Mexico or Vermont, and presumably they would have some knowledge of your existence and the type of work you do.

RI: Yes, via the art publications.

RB: And the exhibits you participated in. This is what I'm trying to drive at, whether this has had any effect on you. . .

RI: Hasn't; hasn't really.

RB: Well, so far fame has not become a burden, as I fear it sometimes does in America. I mean you haven't yet been put on the spot, shall we say, too much?

RI: No. This is probably the most burdensome thing that has happened yet.

RB: Thank you, Sir; well, I'll turn the machine off. No, but it is a thing in American life, as you must be aware, that we over-publicize some of our public figures, and this, I think, could have happened to the detriment of certain painter in the last six or eight years, who have preceded you, and exceeded you so far in publicity and fame. I am speaking now of the generation of Kline and de Kooning who suddenly within a matter of two or there years emerged from poverty and of reputation confined, I think, to art circles into a kind of national celebrity and very large income. And certain burdens are probably attached to this. I don't know, I've never been a public figure so I don't know quite what this does, and I don't suppose you've reached this stage yet, and you may never do so, but you might imagine, I'm sure, that as a