Lawsuit Claiming Robert Indiana Forgeries Resolved With $102 M. Settlement

A New York jury has brought an eight-year dispute over Robert Indiana's legacy to a decisive close, finding art publisher Michael McKenzie liable for copyright infringement and forgery tied to altered and unauthorized versions of the Pop artist's work. The Morgan Art Foundation, which brought the case, was awarded $102.2 million in damages.

The verdict reached beyond Indiana's best-known image, LOVE, the stacked serif composition that became one of the most recognizable emblems of 20th-century Pop art. Jurors also found infringement involving The Ninth American Dream, USA FUN, and BRAT, a sculpture made in homage to bratwurst and later sold to a sausage maker in Wisconsin.

The case began shortly before Indiana died in 2018 at age 89, when the Morgan Art Foundation sued McKenzie, along with the artist's executor, James W. Brannan, and longtime caretaker, Jamie Thomas. The foundation accused them of seeking to isolate Indiana and profit from unauthorized and forged works. Those claims against Brannan and Thomas were settled in 2021.

McKenzie's lawyer, Nicole Brenecki, said he will consider his options, including an appeal. In court, she disputed the foundation's account of the rights at issue, while Luke Nikas, representing Morgan, argued that Indiana had been isolated and exploited in his final years.

The legal battle has unfolded alongside a broader effort to define who controls Indiana's archive, images, and market. In 2022, lawyers for the estate agreed to pay more than $2 million to the Maine Attorney General's Office after it alleged that legal representatives were paying themselves too much. The following year, Bob Keyes published The Isolation Artist: Scandal, Deception, and the Last Days of Robert Indiana, examining the artist's final months.

Indiana's work has continued to circulate widely since then, with exhibitions in Venice in 2024 and shows at Kasmin and Pace in New York in 2025. The Star of Hope Foundation, which Indiana created to support artists in Maine, has also joined with the Morgan Art Foundation to convert his former home there into a public art space. In 2024, Pace Gallery took on global representation of Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, founded by dealer Simon Salama-Caro in 2022.

For an artist whose imagery became inseparable from American visual culture, the verdict underscores how contested legacy can become once an estate, a market, and a signature image collide.

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