Perhaps unsurprisingly, variations on “are Indiana’s best performing works at auction. Indiana’s top price was achieved for a red-and-blue-painted aluminium “LOVE” sculpture. Of the 39 works that have made more than $1 million at auction, just 10 were not expressions ofIndiana’s market was on the rise right up until the 2008 financial crisis, when his total sales crashed 84 percent in 2009. But the market quickly recovered, reaching a peak in 2011, when his work made $19.2 million at auction.
they were reproduced on key rings and t-shirts, and even immortalized on a postage stamp—the less critics wanted to engage seriously with his work. Indiana became so disillusioned with the critical response in New York that he up and left the city in 1978 for a remote island off the coast of Maine, where he spent the remaining four decades of his life.
But his fortunes began to change in the two decades before his death with a wave of exhibitions bringing more attention to his lesser known works, and in 2013 a critically acclaimed retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art awakened art world cognescenti to a more ominous side of his oeuvre.Meanwhile, Indiana was getting older and more frail, and dark accusations regarding how he was treated at the end of his life might have interrupted that trajectory.
Though the warring factions reached an out of court settlement last March, the Morgan filed a new motion against McKenzie in December which has yet to be resolved. The legal saga has no doubt had a harmful impact on his market. Now that the epic is nearing some kind of conclusion, and exhibitions like the one on view in the U.K. continue to broaden the public understanding of his oeuvre, it remains to be seen whether Indiana’s market will regain its footing in the months and years to come.