Chief

Material

Oil on canvas; 61.00 x 56.00 cm

Dating

1969

About the artwork

The painting Chief is unusual in Indiana’s oeuvre for its incorporation of cursive letters, here evoking the Coca-Cola logo. The word “chief” appears again, in the same cursive script, in the painting Decade: Autoportrait 1965 (1975). In an interview with Susan Elizabeth Ryan (May 5, 1992) Indiana noted that it was a reference to having met President Johnson, the Commander in Chief, when his work was exhibited at The White House Festival of the Arts in June 1965. The work exhibited in the festival was The Calumet (1961), whose pendant is the sculpture Chief (1962). The painting’s red and yellow rays recall the herm’s red and yellow danger stripes, and the works share the same title, however the chief referrenced in the herm is Hiawatha, the precolonial Native American leader and co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy.

About the artist

Robert Indiana (* 13 September 1928 in New Castle, Indiana; real name Robert Clark; † 19 May 2018 in Vinalhaven, Maine) was an American painter and a major exponent of Pop Art and signal art.

Indiana became known for his striking sign paintings, which are among the most radical expressions in Pop Art. Just as simple as Indiana’s 1966 work LOVE with its letters L and O, including V and E – in the colours red, blue and green – appear his other works of numbers, letters and five-pointed stars. This simplicity, the compression to the most essential, borrowed from advertising, led to the fact that his pictures could and did become a logo, a lettrist-emblematic image figure.