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Lot Essay
Including: Eat; Die; Hug; Err; American Dream 1928-1963
Distinguishing himself from his Pop peers, in the early sixties Indiana chose to concentrate on the more abstract commercial signs than to those of mass media. Fascinated by the highway signs he observed from his childhood, roadside commerce became part of his basic vocabulary along with the four words, EAT, HUG, ERR, and DIE (his definition of the American Dream). J. McCoubrey wrote "These words signify a voyage in which intimacy, love, pleasure and danger and death in so many lives, as on the highway are leveled by repetition and reduced to non-experience. Love, intimacy and perhaps all human relationships become HUG, sin ERR. Eat equals DIE in an equation he spelling out in his EAT/DIE 1962 painting. Optimism and naiveti are in these paintings only as they reflect the naiveti of the lives he thus circumscribes."
Distinguishing himself from his Pop peers, in the early sixties Indiana chose to concentrate on the more abstract commercial signs than to those of mass media. Fascinated by the highway signs he observed from his childhood, roadside commerce became part of his basic vocabulary along with the four words, EAT, HUG, ERR, and DIE (his definition of the American Dream). J. McCoubrey wrote "These words signify a voyage in which intimacy, love, pleasure and danger and death in so many lives, as on the highway are leveled by repetition and reduced to non-experience. Love, intimacy and perhaps all human relationships become HUG, sin ERR. Eat equals DIE in an equation he spelling out in his EAT/DIE 1962 painting. Optimism and naiveti are in these paintings only as they reflect the naiveti of the lives he thus circumscribes."