ROBERT INDIANA (1928-2018)

Four Americans in Paris was the witty title of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970-71. The show included over 220 paintings, works on paper, prints and sculptures which once belonged to the collections of the Stein family in Paris. Gertrude, her two brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife Sarah were amongst the earliest patrons of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, whose works they collected alongside those of Cezanne, Manet, Bonnard, Renoir and others.
MoMA's press release explained at the time: This extraordinary family, who created what has been called the first museum of modern art, traded pictures back and forth — among themselves, with their artist friends and with dealers. "In later years," Leo Stein wrote, "people often said to me that they wished they were able to buy such things for such prices, and I had to remind them that they also were in Paris then and had more money than I had."
For this now legendary New York exhibition of French masterpieces of modern art, Robert Indiana designed a poster, which - with his signature number motif, clever use of the French and American national colors and a Western-style font - has itself become Pop Art classic.