- Open today, 10 am to 5 pm.
- Parking & Directions
- Free Admission
Fire Bridge
Artist:
Robert Indiana
(American, 1928 - 2018)
Date: 1964-65
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm)
Classification: Modern art
Credit Line: Gift of Jean Outland Chrysler
Copyright: © Morgan Art Foundation Ltd. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Object number: 75.103
Terms
- Abstract
- Bridge
- Brooklyn Bridge
- Blue
- Black
- Yellow
- Red
- Pop art
- New York
In Collection(s)
On view
DescriptionThis is an oil on canvas painting; it is a square canvas tilted so that the top, bottom and sides each is a point of the corners. Within the "diamond" canvas, Indiana drew a yellow-bordered circle. Below the circle in stenciled letters are the words "Fire Bridge." Within the circle, he depicts a symetrically balanced bridge with two arches. This painting is in reference to the Brooklyn Bridge, New York; it features one of the bridge's gothic towers in black, and the cables in red and yellow, set against a dark blue sky.
Exhibition History"Art in Progress," Finch College Museum of Art, New York, N.Y., opened February 25, 1965. (Exh. cat. no. 8)
"Contemporary Art USA," Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, Norfolk, Va., March 18 - April 10, 1966. (Exh. cat. no. 27)
"Three Hundred Years of American Art in the Chrysler Museum," Chrysler Museum at Norfolk, Va., March 1 - July 4, 1976.
"Robert Indiana Retrospective," University of Texas, Austin, Tex., September 25 - November 7, 1977; Chrysler Museum at Norfolk, Va., December 1, 1977 - January 15, 1978; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Ind., February 21 - April 2; Art Center, South Bend, Ind., June 2 - July 16, 1978.
"The Great East River Bridge," The Brooklyn Museum, N.Y., March 19 - June 19, 1983.
"The Common Wealth: American Masterpieces from Virginia Collections," Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts, Va., December 1, 1990 - February 3, 1991.
Selections from the Permanent Collection, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, Feb 1998-Mar 2000; Jun 2004-March 2005; Aug 2005-2008; Nov 2009-Dec 2011; Apr 2014 - Dec 2015; Jan 2016 - Oct 2017.
Wonderstudio, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia July 22, 2021- present
"Contemporary Art USA," Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, Norfolk, Va., March 18 - April 10, 1966. (Exh. cat. no. 27)
"Three Hundred Years of American Art in the Chrysler Museum," Chrysler Museum at Norfolk, Va., March 1 - July 4, 1976.
"Robert Indiana Retrospective," University of Texas, Austin, Tex., September 25 - November 7, 1977; Chrysler Museum at Norfolk, Va., December 1, 1977 - January 15, 1978; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Ind., February 21 - April 2; Art Center, South Bend, Ind., June 2 - July 16, 1978.
"The Great East River Bridge," The Brooklyn Museum, N.Y., March 19 - June 19, 1983.
"The Common Wealth: American Masterpieces from Virginia Collections," Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts, Va., December 1, 1990 - February 3, 1991.
Selections from the Permanent Collection, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, Feb 1998-Mar 2000; Jun 2004-March 2005; Aug 2005-2008; Nov 2009-Dec 2011; Apr 2014 - Dec 2015; Jan 2016 - Oct 2017.
Wonderstudio, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia July 22, 2021- present
Label textRobert Indiana
American, b. 1928
Fire Bridge, 1964–65
Oil on canvas
Robert Indiana’s work recalls a barge fire he saw outside his window on the East River. The artist combined the vivid spectacle with well-known depictions of the Brooklyn Bridge by the artist Joseph Stella. Can you pick out the bridge’s gothic archways and suspended cables? While the sweeping lines and dynamic blocks of color refer both to dramatic real-life events and to earlier artworks, Indiana’s flat, mechanical technique also suggests the color reproductions found in art books and advertising logos. As such, the work deliberately mixes the worlds of art, commerce, and daily experience.
Gift of Jean Outland Chrysler 75.103
American, b. 1928
Fire Bridge, 1964–65
Oil on canvas
Robert Indiana’s work recalls a barge fire he saw outside his window on the East River. The artist combined the vivid spectacle with well-known depictions of the Brooklyn Bridge by the artist Joseph Stella. Can you pick out the bridge’s gothic archways and suspended cables? While the sweeping lines and dynamic blocks of color refer both to dramatic real-life events and to earlier artworks, Indiana’s flat, mechanical technique also suggests the color reproductions found in art books and advertising logos. As such, the work deliberately mixes the worlds of art, commerce, and daily experience.
Gift of Jean Outland Chrysler 75.103
Published References
Prepared by Elayne H. Varian with statements by the artists, _Art in Process: The Visual Development of a Painting_, exh. cat., Finch College Museum of Art, New York, N.Y., 1965, no. 8.
Foreward by Foy C. Casper, Jr., _Contemporary Art USA_, exh. cat., Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, Norfolk, Va., 1966, no. 27.
Dennis R. Anderson, _Three Hundred Years of American Art in the Chrysler Museum_, exh. cat., Norfolk, Va., 1975, 243.
Donald B. Goodall, et al., _Robert Indiana_, exh. cat., University Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin, 1977, 57, no. 20.
Thomas W. Styron, "Indiana Retrospective on View," Chrysler Museum at Norfolk _Bulletin_ 6, no. 12 (December 1977): cover.
_The Chrysler Museum: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Norfolk, Virginia_ (Norfolk: Chrysler Museum, 1982), 113. ISBN: 0-940744-37-6
Ruth Stevens Appelhof, _The Common Wealth_, exh. cat., Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts, Va., 1990, 32.
Susan Elizabeth Ryan, _Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech_ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 140. ISBN: 0300079575
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 242-243, no. 148. ISBN: 0-940744-71-6
Jeff Harrison, _Collecting with Vision: Treasures From the Chrysler Museum of Art_ (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2007), 82, fig. 96. ISBN: 978-0-940744-72-1
Provenance
Stable Gallery, Jeanne and Max Wasserman, Boston; Richard deKoster, New York
[Sotheby Parke Bernet, Los Angeles, Important Modern and Contemporary Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, February 3, 1975, lot 55]; Walter P. Chrysler (1975); Gift of Jean Outland Chrysler to The Chrysler Museum Of Art, Norfolk, Virginia (1975)
Catalogue EntryRobert Indiana
New Castle, Ind. 1928
Fire Bridge, 1964-65
Oil on canvas, 48 × 48 in. (123 × 123 cm)
Stenciled on reverse: ROBERT INDIANA
THE FIRE BRIDGE
COENTIES SLIP
NEW YORK CITY 1964-5
Gift of Jean Outland Chrysler, 75.103
Reproduction © 2004 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
References: Donald B. Goodall et al., Robert Indiana, exhib. cat., University Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin et al., 1977-78, p. 57, no. 20; Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech, New Haven, 2000, pp. 139, 140.
Painter, sculptor, printmaker, and poet, Robert Indiana is best known for brightly colored, hard-edged compositions emblazoned with highly charged words and numbers. Rendered in the bold, flat stenciled style of 1950s commercial signs and billboards and commenting on both the promise and the limits of the American Dream, Indiana's works made him a leader of the Pop art movement in 1960s New York (see objects 71.699, 71.676, 77.420, 87.508, 87.507, 81.39). His 1966 word-image LOVE would become one of the era's most famous works of art and an international symbol of the sixties counterculture.
Indiana arrived in New York in 1954 and within two years had settled in a deserted sail-making loft on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, near the East River. (Among the leftover shipbuilding materials he found in the loft were nineteenth-century crate stencils, which he used to fabricate his first word-images.) The area was then home to a group of young avant-garde painters that included Ellsworth Kelly, whom Indiana soon befriended and whose hard-edged, geometric color abstractions would give direction to his own artistic development. He drew inspiration, too, from the classic American texts of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Hart Crane, and from Charles Demuth's seminal 1928 painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold.
Indiana's lofts on Coenties Slip-he occupied two in the area before removing to a studio on the Bowery in 1965-afforded him views of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, "through whose antique cables," he enthused at the time, "the sun rises each morning." An inspirational symbol of the American experience, the Brooklyn Bridge held considerable romantic appeal for Indiana, both as a painter and a poet, and in 1964-65 he paid tribute to the structure in a series of three Bridge paintings: To the Bridge (private collection, Toronto), The Bridge (The Brooklyn Bridge) (Detroit Institute of Arts), and the Chrysler Museum's Fire Bridge. Indiana included Fire Bridge in an exhibition of contemporary painting mounted in New York in early 1965 at the Finch College Museum of Art, and in the accompanying catalogue he commented at length on the work's creation and on the artistic and poetic references embedded within it:
Fire Bridge . . . is of multiple inspiration. For one it comes from the reality of my having seen the Brooklyn Bridge from my studio windows almost every day for the last eight years. . . . Secondly it passes through both a literary and a plastic influence; it is a complementary painting to a larger and more elaborate To the Bridge that started as an indirect homage to Joseph Stella, the one painter most conspicuously identified with the subject [see no. 98], and ended as a definite salute to Hart Crane, whose life and death proved transfigured by it. Thirdly and finally it stems from an actual event in my life.
On June 25, 1958, shortly after midnight, a freighter and an oil barge collided on the East River near the Brooklyn Bridge, resulting in a catastrophic explosion that sent a one-hundred-foot arc of flame across the river. Indiana, out walking that night, witnessed the explosion and saw the bridge "aglow from the fire."
As is the case with the other pictures in the Bridge series, the Chrysler painting features the signature image of one of the structure's gothic towers set amid radiating spans of cable and framed within a circle. The painting's vibrant color scheme is, however, unique within the series. The tower's nocturnal silhouette is set against the deep blue of the night sky, and the bright red and yellow bands of cable read like arcs of light and flame, alluding specifically to the dramatic event of June 1958. But the work is by no means a melancholy recollection of an industrial accident. Indeed, that event was merely a stepping off point for Indiana, who created in Fire Bridge a transcendent image of poetic revelation radiant with light and color, an unabashedly romantic celebration of an American icon, the "Great East River Bridge" of Whitman, Stella, and Crane.
JCH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 242-243, no. 148.
New Castle, Ind. 1928
Fire Bridge, 1964-65
Oil on canvas, 48 × 48 in. (123 × 123 cm)
Stenciled on reverse: ROBERT INDIANA
THE FIRE BRIDGE
COENTIES SLIP
NEW YORK CITY 1964-5
Gift of Jean Outland Chrysler, 75.103
Reproduction © 2004 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
References: Donald B. Goodall et al., Robert Indiana, exhib. cat., University Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin et al., 1977-78, p. 57, no. 20; Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech, New Haven, 2000, pp. 139, 140.
Painter, sculptor, printmaker, and poet, Robert Indiana is best known for brightly colored, hard-edged compositions emblazoned with highly charged words and numbers. Rendered in the bold, flat stenciled style of 1950s commercial signs and billboards and commenting on both the promise and the limits of the American Dream, Indiana's works made him a leader of the Pop art movement in 1960s New York (see objects 71.699, 71.676, 77.420, 87.508, 87.507, 81.39). His 1966 word-image LOVE would become one of the era's most famous works of art and an international symbol of the sixties counterculture.
Indiana arrived in New York in 1954 and within two years had settled in a deserted sail-making loft on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, near the East River. (Among the leftover shipbuilding materials he found in the loft were nineteenth-century crate stencils, which he used to fabricate his first word-images.) The area was then home to a group of young avant-garde painters that included Ellsworth Kelly, whom Indiana soon befriended and whose hard-edged, geometric color abstractions would give direction to his own artistic development. He drew inspiration, too, from the classic American texts of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Hart Crane, and from Charles Demuth's seminal 1928 painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold.
Indiana's lofts on Coenties Slip-he occupied two in the area before removing to a studio on the Bowery in 1965-afforded him views of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, "through whose antique cables," he enthused at the time, "the sun rises each morning." An inspirational symbol of the American experience, the Brooklyn Bridge held considerable romantic appeal for Indiana, both as a painter and a poet, and in 1964-65 he paid tribute to the structure in a series of three Bridge paintings: To the Bridge (private collection, Toronto), The Bridge (The Brooklyn Bridge) (Detroit Institute of Arts), and the Chrysler Museum's Fire Bridge. Indiana included Fire Bridge in an exhibition of contemporary painting mounted in New York in early 1965 at the Finch College Museum of Art, and in the accompanying catalogue he commented at length on the work's creation and on the artistic and poetic references embedded within it:
Fire Bridge . . . is of multiple inspiration. For one it comes from the reality of my having seen the Brooklyn Bridge from my studio windows almost every day for the last eight years. . . . Secondly it passes through both a literary and a plastic influence; it is a complementary painting to a larger and more elaborate To the Bridge that started as an indirect homage to Joseph Stella, the one painter most conspicuously identified with the subject [see no. 98], and ended as a definite salute to Hart Crane, whose life and death proved transfigured by it. Thirdly and finally it stems from an actual event in my life.
On June 25, 1958, shortly after midnight, a freighter and an oil barge collided on the East River near the Brooklyn Bridge, resulting in a catastrophic explosion that sent a one-hundred-foot arc of flame across the river. Indiana, out walking that night, witnessed the explosion and saw the bridge "aglow from the fire."
As is the case with the other pictures in the Bridge series, the Chrysler painting features the signature image of one of the structure's gothic towers set amid radiating spans of cable and framed within a circle. The painting's vibrant color scheme is, however, unique within the series. The tower's nocturnal silhouette is set against the deep blue of the night sky, and the bright red and yellow bands of cable read like arcs of light and flame, alluding specifically to the dramatic event of June 1958. But the work is by no means a melancholy recollection of an industrial accident. Indeed, that event was merely a stepping off point for Indiana, who created in Fire Bridge a transcendent image of poetic revelation radiant with light and color, an unabashedly romantic celebration of an American icon, the "Great East River Bridge" of Whitman, Stella, and Crane.
JCH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 242-243, no. 148.