A lawsuit claiming copyright infringement and forgery of the work of major American Pop artist Robert Indiana has come to a conclusion after eight long years.
A New York jury found that art publisher Michael McKenzie had created unauthorized and altered versions of Indiana’s work, reports the New York Times. The suit included some versions of Indiana’s trademark work, LOVE, which depicts the word love in lively serif characters, the LO situated atop the VE, with the O placed at an angle.
The Morgan Art Foundation sued McKenzie, claiming he infringed upon its rights and created bogus artworks that detracted from both the artist’s reputation and his market. The jury awarded the foundation $102.2 million in damages. McKenzie’s lawyer, Nicole Brenecki, said he will consider his options, including an appeal.
“The isolation and exploitation of Robert Indiana in the last years, months and even days before he died was a tragedy, and Michael McKenzie was the mastermind,” Luke Nikas, a lawyer for Morgan, said in his closing argument, per the Times. For her part, Brenecki disputed the foundation’s claims about what rights it held. “What they were trying to protect was their money,” she said in court. But the jury sided with the foundation, concluding McKenzie had infringed its rights with a number of LOVE prints and sculptures as well as The Ninth American Dream (2001), USA FUN (1965), and BRAT, a sculpture created in homage to bratwurst, which McKenzie sold to a sausage maker in Wisconsin.
The jury decision caps an eight-year-long legal battle that began shortly before the artist died in 2018 at age 89, when the Morgan Art Foundation sued the executor of his estate, James W. Brannan, as well as the artist’s longtime caretaker, Jamie Thomas, claiming Thomas and others had sought “to isolate Indiana” and “reap the profits from selling unauthorized and forged works.” In 2021, the foundation settled its complaints against Brannan and Thomas. That same year, journalist Bob Keyes published the book The Isolation Artist: Scandal, Deception, and the Last Days of Robert Indiana, aiming to explore the artist’s final days. The following year, lawyers for the estate agreed to pay out more than $2 million to the Maine Attorney General’s Office, which had claimed that legal representatives for the estate were paying themselves too much money.
Since then, the artist has been the subject of exhibitions internationally, including in Venice in 2024 as well as shows at Kasmin and Pace in New York in 2025.
The Star of Hope Foundation, which Indiana formed to support artists in Maine, joined up with the Morgan Art Foundation to convert the artist’s former home there into an art space open to the public. The Star of Hope Foundation’s principal asset is a body of work Indiana left behind when he died. It also earns royalties when Morgan sells the artist’s works.
In 2024, Pace Gallery took on global representation of Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, formed by dealer Simon Salama-Caro in 2022 and billing itself as the primary organization responsible for maintaining Indiana’s art and archives.
