(birds chirping) (waves breaking) (soft music) - When I was matriculating at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dean of the school had a suspicion that I was not going to win a traveling fellowship, So he engineered it that I would receive a summer scholarship to Skowhegan here in Maine.

As it turned out, I did win a traveling fellowship and spent a year in Europe, but on my way to Europe, I had a summer in Skowhegan, and that's what brought me to Maine.

And it was because of a visit to Skowhegan that I met the gentlemen who invited myself and my friend to come and see his island, which was Vinalhaven.

And it was on that first day that I saw the Star of Hope.

And within 10 days, Eliot Elisofon, former "Life" magazine photographer, bought the building for me.

(soft music) As I say, my life is full of coincidences, and it's just an interesting coincidence that the man who bought this building for me, who brought me to Vinalhaven, was a staff photographer for "Life" magazine.

Well, if there was one important influence in my life as far as art went, it was "Life" magazine.

Because for the first time, there were good reproductions of American paintings as no other magazine had ever...

Remember, it was "Life" magazine that even gave Picasso a whole issue, nothing but Picasso from one end to the other, and it played a great, it was a great influence on my life.

(soft music) Over the years, the odd fellows called their building here several different names.

And when I riffled through some old stationary upstairs in the attic or in one of the closets, I found that at one time they had called it the Star of Hope, and since stars have always been one of my favorite motifs, why, that was the one I chose.

(soft music) This is also Casa de Amor.

I mean, it's not only the Star of Hope, it's Casa de Amor.

And as far as I'm concerned, love is still the most important thing.

(upbeat music) It all comes from a little painting, which is now in the Portland Museum of Art.

There were four stars, two stacked on two, with just the regular word love down out at the bottom, and that gave me the idea that the letters could be stacked as the stars were stacked.

And just at that time, the Museum of Modern Art commissioned me to do a Christmas card for the museum, and that I submitted three designs or three color variations.

And of course they chose the one that became best known, the red, blue, and green, and that became the most popular Christmas card the museum had ever issued.

And from there, it just went on and on.

(upbeat music) But when pop started exploding, there was a great rush.

Dealers were scurrying around trying to enlist this new breed of artist.

And the lady who gave me my first one man show was Eleanor Ward, the Stable Gallery.

I had three shows there.

(upbeat music) I became uncomfortable when, in the sixties, when people took advantage of it not being properly copyrighted, but there were endless rip offs, and that could have been suffocating, but fortunately the sixties and the seventies are long gone, and it's no longer a problem.

The "LOVE" being red, blue, and green came about because of a Phillips 66 sign, which I used to see every day of my life when my mother would drive in to pick up my father on his 38th Street office.

We would pass this huge Phillips 66 sign.

It was up in the sky.

And in those days, Phillips 66 gasoline stations were all red and green, and it was the red and green of that Phillips 66 sign against the blue sky that accounts for my favorite colors.

(upbeat music) It is, of course, my goal that loves should cover the world.

Individually, it is growing, and we're already laying plans to make a 24 foot long.

It's like Mount Everest.

We all know about the highest mountain in the world is.

And the larger "LOVE" gets, the more attention it will receive.

And of course, I haven't restricted myself to the English language.

Ahava is the Hebrew word for love.

And now I've involved with the Chinese word for love, which by coincidence happens to be, ài, and I, of course, is my first initial.

Love wins out in the end, you see.

As far as I'm concerned, that's as it should be.

(soft music) My name is Robert Clark.

All one has to do is look at any telephone book, and there are too many Clarks.

And I simply wanted to steer away from that kind of being swamped in a sea of names.

Know that somehow or another, of course there are several artists named Smith, and the Smiths didn't seem to feel that they had to change their name, but there's a difference between Clark and Smith.

As far as I'm concerned, probably my major regret is that due to "LOVE" and what happened in the sixties, I'm only identified as a pop artist.

And of course, I certainly didn't start out life as a pop artist.

I started out making art when I was in the, before the first grade.

(soft music) This is the mill across the street from my grandmother's house in Morrisville, and in a department store in Indianapolis, this was my first painting sold for $10.

And on eBay, I recently picked it up for 6,000.

The first grade, that school turned out to be very important in my life because at the end of my first year, I would do drawings at home and bring them in and present them to my teacher in the morning.

But it was that same teacher, who at the end of that first year in Morrisville, Indiana, asked if she might keep a couple of my drawings because she felt that one day I was going to be a famous artist.

So I had no choice.

It was inevitable.

I had to become a famous artist.

And 40 years later, I go back to this little town, and she's no longer teaching, but she's alive.

And I have a coffee at her house, never saw her in between.

And she jumps up and goes into the bedroom and brings out my two drawings.

And what she wants is that I signed them with my new name.

She didn't want Robert Clark.

She wanted Robert Indiana she would say.

(soft music) The most important person in my life, who greatly influenced me of course, was Ellsworth Kelly.

And our meeting was just pure chance.

I'd been working for three years at an art store on 57th Street, and I had gotten up to the position of being able to arrange the windows, and I put postcards on display.

And one day, someone came in and asked for Matisse's "Still Life with Oysters," and that person happened to be Ellsworth Kelly.

(soft music) He had a very lousy studio at the time, and I was desperately in the need of a new studio.

And he just happened to know someone down on Coenties Slip who had some empty buildings available, and steered me to my first loft on Coenties Slip, was $30 a month.

And that was the beginning of my most productive period was on Coenties Slip.

(soft music) But after he had found me my a loft on Coenties Slip, he found another loft and Coenties Slip.

I couldn't have afforded it, it was forty-five dollars a month, and he could.

And so for several years, we were neighbors on Coenties Slip, and then his old painter friend from France, Jack Youngerman, moved to the slip with his wife, who was a French actress, Delphine Seyrig, and Agnes Martin showed up, and James Rosenquist was another customer of mine at the art store.

And he came and brought his friend, Charles Hinman.

And pretty soon we had a colony.

Very private little enclave, all within three blocks of each other.

Unfortunately, they began tearing those old buildings down, and we all had to clear out in around '65.

We were gone.

(soft music) What developed was my influence from Ellsworth, and that was simply hard edge.

I had never considered painting in this manner before.

Kelly initiated that.

And it simply led to other things.

(soft music) Well, let's say that for the early part of my life I was simply a figurative painter.

It was only when I met Ellsworth Kelly that I stopped being an American realist and became what I am now.

I was stuck with the dilemma of being too much influenced by Ellsworth.

I had to make some kind of a radical departure, and that was the addition of the word.

And then shortly thereafter, Ellsworth never spoke to me again.

(soft music) He didn't like paintings that had words.

He's a real Puritan.

(soft music) I've always considered myself the least pop of the pop artists, but given my place in time and what happened in the art world, I can't escape that designation.

None of us really liked that term at the beginning.

Other terms were used, new realists, vulgarians, all kinds of things, and then Lawrence Alloway's pop stuck, and then we were stuck.

I consider my work primarily autobiographical.

Almost everything I've done has some relationship to something in my life.

I am painting and writing my own history.

(soft music) (piano music) My involvement with numbers started with my mother and her insistence on moving from house to house in Indiana.

Before I was 17 years old, I had lived in 21 different houses.

And for my mother and father, their only amusement was really the automobile.

And so we'd jumped in the car and go driving around and check out all of those houses that we had lived in.

And of course, there was a number one, and there was a number two, and there was a number three.

(soft music) It was in and around Indianapolis that I lived in those 21 different houses before I was 17 years old.

My mother simply always had the feeling that the next house was going to be better than the last house.

And as it turned out, it was just the opposite.

As we moved on through the Depression, the houses got tackier and tackier, and of course, in Morrisville, my father was... (swan trumpeting) Oh, we have a friend.

Bring that guy... - [Beau] Should I bring him in?

- Bring that guy over, Beau.

He wants to be in the film.

(swan trumpeting) Oh, he's my old buddy.

Yes.

Get in back of me.

Hey, what are you doing, kid?

Hey.

What's wrong with you, pretty boy?

What's wrong with you, boy?

Nice guy.

Dale, you have to... (teeth clattering) (animal screeching) (upbeat music) - We lived under a international harvester factory, and the fumes and the smoke from that factory were beginning to affect my health.

This was before I started to school.

And the doctors told my family that we should move from that location and into country air.

So that necessitated to move to a Morrisville.

But on the farm in Morrisville, my father was definitely not cut out to be a farmer.

My mother, however, loved animals, and I even had my own calf named Daisy.

And when we moved into the house, it was found that the well was not good, and a new well had to be dug.

And in the meantime, I would take my, what did you call those little wagons, down to the neighbor's house and fill up glass jars of water.

And I would bring them back up the hill.

And that's how I made my first money, selling water to my mother and father as they toiled on this house in Indiana.

(swans trumpeting) Noisy guys.

Well, I think we should talk about the dogs in my life.

Yeah.

- [Dale] Absolutely.

- Well, this is the Suzu, is the latest dog in my life.

She happens to belong to one of my most valuable helpers, and she's a very new addition and probably one of the happiest I've ever had.

She's a sweetheart of a dog.

Very, very affectionate.

So we got a good close up of Suzu?

- [Dale] Yes, we do.

- Oh, Suzu, you're going to be famous.

Yes, Dale's going to make you famous.

- [Man] He is.

- [Roger] Her predecessor happened to be a pit bull.

- [Dale] Did you have a great dane at one time?

- Oh yes.

I've forgotten the most impressive dog of all, and that was Casso.

He was so named so that, when we took him for a walk, we could say Picasso and out of deference to one of my favorite painters, of course.

(upbeat music) And he lived here on Vinalhaven and managed to break my leg, pulled me down a snowbank.

So I've had better luck with cats.

Let's put it that way.

(soft music) (soft music) Given the portrait of my mother and father, which was done in the middle of all of this 1960 business, that's about as realistic and as figurative as you can get.

They're taken from actual family snapshots of my mother and father, slightly altered to make for a more arresting situation.

And I really meant to continue that.

The only trouble was those two paintings took me four years to finish, and it was almost too much a labor of love.

Whereas, I had meant to continue "Mother and Father," they stand finished as they are.

(soft music) I wanted to do four seasons.

As it stands, mother and father are standing in a very wintry road by their Model T in Indiana.

And the thought was to do autumn with leaves on the trees, and summer with green leaves, and then of course, as the seasons got warmer, mother and father would begin to shed more clothing.

Whereas at this point, she stands with one breast exposed, and my father has no trousers on, as spring and summer approached, there'd be less and less until I ended up with a nude mother and father, and, you know, shocking people is kind of fun, too.

And I think that might've caused serious repercussions, you see.

Some of my most important years, just personally and for my art, was the fact that I transferred from a country school.

I was living with my mother, my mother and father had been separated.

The country schools had no art.

And I felt very, very deprived.

Then my father, who was still working in Indianapolis at Phillips 66, invited me to join him and his new wife, my stepmother.

And it just so happened that my stepmother's father was a janitor at Arsenal Tech, one of the largest high schools in Indianapolis, but the real grabber was the art department had a faculty of 12 teachers.

And that's when I became very involved with journalism.

I was the photographic editor of the school yearbook, and then got a job at the "Indianapolis Star."

I worked at the "Indianapolis Star" for three years.

So I became very close to journalism and writing and most importantly, type because in those days, things were still printed with type, you know, and my letters, of course, the three dimensional letters are really just big pieces of type.

(soft music) and I worked my schedule out so then my senior year, out of an academic day of eight hours, I had six hours devoted just to art.

And that probably couldn't have happened in many other places.

And I had a marvelous art teacher who, a lady Watercolors from Philadelphia, who inspired me to go on to, it was at her recommendation that I went to the Artist Institute of Chicago.

The GI Bill, this was 1945-46, was about to expire.

And so, I think I had the premonition that that was a good time to enlist in the Army, and I got five years of free schooling via the GI Bill.

I spent a year in Alaska, did a little bit of art work, but more journalism.

I edited the camp newspaper called the "Sourdough Sentinel," and I worked it up into the largest military newspaper in Alaska, and in the process, gave myself a nervous breakdown.

And so I was set out to the Aleutians to recover.

And of course, I fly out to the Aleutians, landed in a downpour, cold, nasty Aleutian weather.

And I was handed a fishing pole and told that I had to catch my own dinner, you see.

Well, that was not exactly recuperation.

So how I really recovered was that my mother was dying of cancer in Indiana, and I went home on an emergency leave, and that ended my ended my career in Alaska.

(soft music) She held on for much longer than she should have.

I couldn't even recognize it when I saw her.

And she struggled as I came in to ask if I had something to eat.

And then in five minutes, she was dead.

That spurred me to work with the subject of "Eat/Die."

And of course, "Eat/Die" is a diptych.

The two paintings should belong together, but in the course of time, they got separated.

(soft music) It's biggest realization, of course, came in 1964 at the New York World's Fair with a large electric eat sign that unfortunately, I never have seen lit because the fair officials had to turn it off because people were farming in front of a theater to want to get something to eat, and there was nothing to eat.

(soft music) "Hug" and "Err," and it should be in that order.

Hug was the only word, or the most frequent word, that my mother used in relation to affection.

In other words, you know, give me a hug and that sort of thing.

And of course, in the Puritanic tradition of America, that's getting close to being sinful, you see.

Hugging is erring.

(soft music) In my own sculpture, I prefer what probably were mainly beams because they relate in form to the ancient herms, which the Greeks and the Romans used.

And most all of my wood pieces are herms, which Hermes was the messenger of the gods.

And as a painter and as a sign painter, I feel that I'm delivering messages myself.

(upbeat music) "The Mother of Us All," which is filled with characters from American history, from Susan B. Anthony through John Adams to Daniel Webster, a real circus of the Americana.

All in all, I spent 12 years working on this opera, doing the sets and costumes.

(upbeat music) The lead romantic heroine in "The Mother of Us All" just happened to be named Indiana Elliot, so I couldn't resist that possibility.

Stein, her text and her messages, are filled with preoccupations with names and name changes and right up my alley.

(upbeat music) Mainly because of one of my largest collectors, who was a close friend of the man who ran the Santa Fe Opera, it was brought to Santa Fe.

Mr. Crosby, the owner of the opera, decided that that would be a fitting work to celebrate the Bicentennial, 1976.

I spent a whole summer in Santa Fe.

The opera house is absolutely beautiful, and everything they did there was a very, very professional.

Well, it turned out that the opera was a great success.

It began with a fireworks display over the Mesa in the background of the opera house.

And it was a real Americana pageantry and a beautiful performance.

It got great reviews.

I was on the cover of "ARTnews," one of my sets that I did.

The sets and costumes were all made out of felt.

And I think there was some trepidation about that at the beginning, but if you've ever been in Santa Fe at night, it gets rather chilly.

So those opera singers didn't really mind wearing felt costumes at all.

And of course, the vivid colors of the felt simply translated from my work most vividly.

They opera was only given a few performances.

In the audience, I was very pleased to have Georgia O'Keeffe sitting there watching.

And after the opera was given, the owner, who much preferred more classical kinds of works, moved all of my sets out onto the Mesa in back of the opera house and set fire to them, and that was the end of another episode.

(soft music) (soft music) The "Autoportraits" really started on Coenties Slip, and they started when my career really started.

In other words, I felt myself a worthwhile subject for something by that.

By 1960, things were happening for me.

(soft music) They and the "Hartley Elegies" are definitely my heaviest paintings, rather chocked full content, shall we say.

(soft music) I had a 12 year lease on the Bowery, and after 14 years had passed, remember, this was a block down the street from Louise Nevelson's studio, across the street, was Lichtenstein's studio.

There were a number of artists living on the Bowery.

And at that time, the Bowery was still very much the Bowery.

It was not gentrified in any way.

I overextended my lease.

The landlord politely suggested that I should remove myself from my five floor studio, and that was quite a burden.

(soft music) Finding the Star of Hope simply changed my life because I had only come here in the autumn.

I didn't want to be associated as a summer person.

And of course, September is, September and October are the two nicest months on the island.

And I was not too unhappy to leave New York because the pressure on me, the requests, invitations, et cetera, et cetera, just got to be burdensome, and it was nice to get away from that, from a telephone that never stopped ringing.

(soft music) My crew, mainly lobstermen here on the island, moved me.

It took two vans 12 trips to bring all my possessions from that five story building to, what essentially, at that time, I had only two floors in this building, and it was quite a hassle.

And that's when they rented that little grocery store, which turned out to be on the back lot of Marsden Hartley's house when he lived here in 1938.

And it was just that coincidence that propelled my interest in Marsden Hartley.

I'd never been particularly interested in him before.

And that was the beginning of the "Hartley Elegies."

And I probably spent about six years working on the "Hartley Elegies."

(soft music) All an homage to Marsden Hartley, who probably, every day that he went to the post office, he'd walked right across the front of my building.

(soft music) Well, one of my favorite American paintings at the Metropolitan Museum is Demuth's "Figure 5," and I expanded it into several canvases, and it's probably what I consider one of my very best works.

(soft music) There was a play by Edward Albee, which got great attention at the time.

This is early in the sixties.

Albee's work also was autobiographical, and I went to see "The American Dream" and was obviously struck by it.

And that painting was probably the most important that I ever did because it was hung in a two man show in a less than conspicuous gallery in New York.

And absolutely nothing happened for either of us.

Nothing sold.

But when the show came down, Alfred Barr, the director and the founder of the Museum of Modern Art, happened to saunter in and saw it and acquired it for the Museum of Modern Art, and that more or less started my whole career with a bang, with a bang.

I continued that over the years.

The second "Dream" was purchased by the President of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art.

The third "Dream" was my first painting acquired by a museum in Europe.

It went to Eindhoven, Holland.

The fourth "Dream" went into the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC.

The fifth "Dream" went into the museum in Toronto, and that one is related to the Demuth "5."

Then the sixth "Dream" didn't immediately have such spectacular success, but of course the sixth "Dream" is about my father because he grew up in a family of six, born in June and worked for Phillips 66.

And when he left my mother, he went to California on Highway 66, so very much became associated with him.

There are several sixth "Dream" paintings, and they have gone to various and different places.

The seventh "Dream" had a much more spectacular career, and that was done, I was soon to have my largest retrospective ever in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Nice in France.

And the seventh "Dream," because it was Nice, and it would be hanging in that particular museum, I decided to celebrate the American women who went to France and flowered, primarily Josephine Baker, the Black entertainer, and Princess Grace, of course, who was Prince Rainier's wife, and then Isadora Duncan.

And they all knew Nice very well, and that "Dream" celebrated those ladies.

The eighth "Dream," because of the age, is related to the month of August.

My mother was born in August.

The eighth "Dream" is an homage to my mother.

That happens to be here in the house.

And then the ninth "Dream," which will be my last "Dream," was the principal painting in my first gallery show in New York and years and years at the Kasmin Gallery, and that went into the hands of a private collector.

That's the end of "The American Dream."

(soft music) I watched the destruction of the World Trade Center, and what I came back and painted after 9/11 was "Afghanistan."

Painting, which very much came out of my "Confederacy" series, my protest against what was happening in the south in the sixties.

One of the Mississippi paintings, Alabama painting was shown at the Indianapolis Museum, and a young couple from the south had come to visit the museum and were oohing and awing how beautiful the museum was until they saw my painting, and then they dashed out the front door and said, "We'll never come back here again, you'll see."

That's the kind of shock value that I like.

The "Peace" paintings have come about because of Mr. Bush's war in Iraq, not 9/11.

I switched from a hawk to a dove.

I'm glad I repaired that situation.

(soft music) Certain artists feel compelled to deal with important issues, whereas other artists are painting flowers and nudes, and depends upon the artist's temperament, and I'm simply a person who am enormously interested in history and current events.

And of course, with my "Peace" paintings, I know they will have no effect whatsoever, but it's a wishful thought that they might possibly influence world developments.

Obviously, they're failing completely.

Art can have a limited effect.

Obviously, not too many people go to museums.

More people are going to ballgames and other things.

I think we've lost our influence.

(dramatic music) (soft music) As you may recall, back in the thirties, working class people were the subject of art.

I don't think, these days of affluence, too many people are very interested in working class people.

I think working class people have been pretty well forgotten.

(dramatic music) (soft music) (uplifting music) Probably more of my work is involved with the upbeat and the positive rather than the negative, but I can't forget the negative aspect.

Like "Eat/Die," unfortunately, eat is accompanied by die, and we're stuck with that problem, whether we like it or not.

Immortality is the artist's only chance, you see.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - I think your film looks very good.

(upbeat music)