Robert Indiana
American, 1928-2018
The Confederacy: Alabama, 1965
Oil on canvas, 70 x 60 inches
Gift of Walter A. and Dawn Clark Netsch
1982.185
Robert Indiana’s painting Alabama commemorates the nightmarish events of Selma by surrounding a map of Alabama with the epitaph JUST AS IN THE ANATOMY OF MAN EVERY NATION MUST HAVE ITS HIND PART. Placing Alabama at the center of a target, with Selma marked as the bull’s eye, Indiana makes a simple and direct statement of contempt and shame using a reductive, emphatic sign idiom. His design has the visual potency of an advertisement, poster, product insignia, institutional logo, group emblem, or patriotic banner. Indiana’s adaptation of a promotional format typifies a new approach to history painting, one quite distinctive from European tradition of representational documentation or the style of American social commentary art in the 1930s and 1940s.