Indiana began the painting Beating Hearts (Papa) on July 3, 1961, the day after Ernest Hemingway, known as Papa, died by suicide. In his journal entry for July 4, 1961, he wrote "did not really think of the significance of 'PAPA' until several days later; as it was a strange unconscious tribute [to] Hemingway [to the] surface certainly not my favorite author by a long shot."
The painting can thus be linked to a group of canvases created between 1961 and 1964 which pay tribute to key American literary figures, and which Indiana later characterized as “literary paintings.” These works include Melville (which quotes Chapter 120 of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick), The Calumet (which quotes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Song of Hiawatha”), and Year of Meteors (which quotes a poem of the same name by Walt Whitman). Indiana was also working on these three paintings in July 1961, when he painted Beating Hearts (Papa).
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