Robert Indiana: 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.
Richard Brown Baker: I’m not sure I fully conceive what you mean by “fixed.” Can you elaborate?
Indiana: 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 were fixed. This is what my work would have been closer to.
Excerpt from Richard Brown Baker, Oral history interview with Robert Indiana, September 12 and November 7, 1963. Washington, D.C.: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1963.
