Robert Indiana

Acquired directly from Edition Domberger by the present owner, 2014

Sheehan 46-55

“My involvement with numbers, my first real consciousness about them is simply the fact that I lived in 21 different houses before I was 17 years old and as a child it was a great pastime to tour the countryside and visit all these different houses and to go back to house number 1 and house number 2. That’s the first meaningful association. Otherwise, numbers are just fascinating because they’re numbers, each one loaded with multiple references and significance” - Indiana in conversation with Poppy Gandler Orchier, in Robert Indiana Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné 1951-1991 

One of the most iconic and recurrent motifs throughout Robert Indiana’s work is his ongoing representation of numbers. Nowhere is this affinity for numerical symbols more clearly demonstrated than in his 1968 Numbers series, which is among the most important printed series from the artist’s graphic oeuvre. 

Indiana’s Number prints were created after his Number paintings, which were featured in the artist’s first European solo exhibition at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1966. Following this seminal exhibition, Indiana went on to create the Numbers printed portfolio which features ten screenprints, each contained within a white paper folder with a screenprinted poem by the American poet, Robert Creeley. This unique combination of poetry and screenprint epitomizes Indiana’s penchant for blending text and image, which he was initially drawn to when studying at the University of Edinburgh and became inspired by the historical tradition of the illustrated book in British visual culture. 

In creating his Numbers series Indiana also takes inspiration from his fellow American pop art contemporaries, most notably Jasper Johns. Indiana admitted that he was originally hesitant to create a portfolio centered around consecutively ordered numbers because “Jasper Johns did such a beautiful series of numbers,” (see Lot 50). Both Johns’ and Indiana’s respective numerological series illustrate the revolutionary manner in which leading pop artists of the 1960s transformed ubiquitous symbols from our universal lexicon and elevated them to the status of fine art in their own right.