Robert Indiana

Like many of his Pop art contemporaries in the early 1960s, Robert Indiana turned to advertising and consumer culture as subjects for his art. Growing up in small-town Indiana, the artist became fascinated by Americana and unabashedly embraced his homespun Midwestern roots—even changing his given surname, Clark, to that of his home state in 1958. In his dynamic, brilliantly colored paintings, Indiana drew on the language of highway signs, restaurant billboards, and roadside entertainments.

The X-5, composed as an X-shaped structure reminiscent of the warning signs found at railroad crossings, was one of five works that comprised the fifth suite of Indiana’s series of American Dream paintings. In this suite, Indiana paid homage to an earlier painting: Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928). Demuth’s image, itself inspired by a poem by Williams Carlos Williams, records the impression of seeing a fire engine inscribed with the numeral 5 racing down a New York street. Demuth’s bold decision to use the enlarged, crisply articulated figure 5 as the centerpiece of his composition represented, for Indiana, a “modern step” that presaged his own experiments with words and numbers. In The X-5 Indiana creates a complex geometric configuration by layering Demuth’s 5 over other forms that allude to the number 5—stars and pentagons—and by repeating the image on five panels that are joined together. The X-5 is Indiana’s first canvas composed exclusively in grisaille tones, which he would continue to employ on future occasions as an alternative to his normally vibrant palette.