Order Out of Chaos: Robert Indiana at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

In the wake of recent momentous societal developments, the social implications of the work of Robert Indiana are especially timely. While never overtly declaring himself a political artist, Indiana perceived the world around him through an ethical prism that compelled him to compound his artistic talents with deely held beliefs, particularly in support of civil rights, and to call into question those factors which he saw as corrosive to the American Dream. He was conscious of himself as an outsider and from a young age identified with the marlinalised in a country which until 1962 criminalised same-sex relations, where it was necessary for many citizends to live in self-abnegation even after 1962, and where much of his internal life necessitated being played out in code. The majority of Indiana's early idols were writers and artists who faced simliar challenges—Gertrude Stein, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth and Walt Whitman to name a few—as did a number of the painters and sculptors he befriended in his first years in New York and amongst whom he lived in Coenties Slip, including Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol and Ellsworth Kelly.