Radiating with colorful vitality and geometric complexity, Four Sixes is a masterful example of the timeless and experimental visual lexicon that cements Robert Indiana as an icon of Pop Art. Fascinated by American culture, the artist drew his motifs from captivating advertising campaigns and insignia that populate quotidian life, employing basic shapes like diamonds, circles, and squares to ground his works in a familiar geometric framework. However, Indiana defamiliarizes this common visual language and masterfully elevates it to a symbolic commentary on the banalities and vicissitudes of a contemporary American experience. Executed in 1964, Four Sixes appropriates the ubiquitous number 6, a favorite number of the artist’s, as a self-referential vehicle of expression for the greater American identity. Attesting to its importance, the present work has been notably featured in several major retrospective exhibitions. Furthermore, Four Sixes has exceptional provenance, having been installed in the artist's Spring Street studio, it was gifted to the artist's lifelong friend Bill Katz in 1968. Emily Fisher Landau later acquired the work directly from her close friend Katz who assisted her with building her collection in 1990 where it has remained for the past three decades. A quintessential example of Indiana’s iconographic practice, Four Sixes bears all the hallmarks of the radical lexicon of visual appropriation that has solidified the artist’s legacy as a titan of 20th century art history.
The 1960s bore witness to a veritable assault of images—printed, painted, photographed, stenciled, and copied—that introduced a new set of signs, symbols, and imagery into the cultural canon. Pop artists set out to incorporate this shared visual experience into their work. Although the essence of Indiana's work quotes the same bright colors and urban elements, his literary quality, coded poetry, and repeated geometry distinguishes his work from his Pop contemporaries. In the early 1960s, Indiana chose to concentrate on abstract quotidian signs, such as highway markers—or in the case of the present work, a business calendar found in an office supply store—as a key component of his visual vocabulary. Fascinated by the universality of minimalist forms as accepted shorthand for complex concepts, he often subverted this recognition by altering the color or orientation of these forms to present them with new significance, both highlighting their original meanings and offering fresh interpretations. Indiana incorporates all these elements in Four Sixes. Here, the number 6 is continuously rotated 90 degrees on each of the four panels, creating a hypnotic sense of never-ending movement, or of being caught in a state of constant cyclical motion.
The number 6 bore particular significance to Indiana; as he has explained, “I’m particularly interested in two because it takes a couple of people to make love, and six because my father was born into a family of six members in the month of June, he worked for Phillips 66, and he went west on Highway 66 when he left my mother, passing all those little signs on farmers’ fences that say “use 666,” which is also the sign of the devil – that’s how my mother felt about him because he had left her, you see. And it’s a nice number. I’m not fond of all numbers, but I’m very fond of two and six” (the artist quoted in Jan Garden Castro, “More Famous than John Dillinger: A Conversation with Robert Indiana,” Sculpture 28, no. 2, 2009, p. 45).
“I’m particularly interested in... six because my father was born into a family of six members in the month of June, he worked for Phillips 66, and he went west on Highway 66 when he left my mother, passing all those little signs on farmers’ fences that say “use 666,”... it’s a nice number. I’m not fond of all numbers, but I’m very fond of two and six.”
Further evidence of his numerical obsession, Indiana assigned numbers zero through nine to the various stages of life, quantifying clandestine manifestations of his spiritual reaction to past experiences. Within these parameters, Indiana leaves room for interpretation, bestowing upon his viewers the ability to craft their own associations with the explosively polychromatic works. In displacing the number six and removing its context, the artist asks his viewer to examine the number for its form, rather than its meaning. The number is a stylistic element, a curved shape ensconced within a red circle tucked inside a vibrant blue square. Colors, like numbers, had special meaning to the artist: green and red signified the prime of life for Indiana, while blue typically represented life’s later years. The merging of these colors and their subsequent associations with a number that represents a shift toward old age, Indiana has created a synergistic work that radiates with kinetic energy. Indiana was a master at selecting disparate elements and assembling them into a singular, mesmerizing work of art.
The present work was originally a gift from the artist to his lifelong friend Bill Katz, and was installed in the artist's studio on Spring Street. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, Katz moved to New York City, where he befriended numerous artists of the Pop generation, including icons Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol. Katz became lifelong friends with Indiana, a friendship that can be traced by numerous gifts, including Four Sixes. Katz was also a close friend of Emily Fisher Landau, he assisted her with building her collection throughout the many years of their friendship and she acquired the work from him in 1990. This provenance is testament to the piece’s important place within the art historical canon.
In works like Four Sixes, Indiana takes the language and visual imagery of mass media and transforms it into something specific and meaningful, creating a connection between his individual experience and the anonymous everyman. The dramatic and chromatic Four Sixes transfixes the viewer, creating a call to consciousness of the ways that symbols appear in everyday life. Unifying the graphic tone of Pop with the intellectual content of Conceptualism, Indiana pushed the possibilities of artistic expression, cementing his legacy as one of the most influential artists in the canon of American art history.
