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, 1963 Sept. 12-Nov. 7, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
