Was This Homage to Bratwurst Really Designed by Robert Indiana?

Just how much control did the artist Robert Indiana have over his work during the last years of his life?

A lot, according to two of the artist’s associates: his caretaker in Maine, Jamie L. Thomas, and a New York art publisher, Michael McKenzie, who worked closely with the artist.

Very little, according to a lawsuit filed this spring that accused both men of exploiting Indiana’s advanced age to sell bogus artworks that they attributed to him.

One focal point of the debate has been “BRAT,” a huge sculpture said to have been Indiana’s last monumental work, designed not as an homage to an ethereal concept like Indiana’s “LOVE” or “HOPE,” but to the humble bratwurst. Skeptics said they were dubious that Indiana, who died in May at 89, actually signed off on the work commissioned last year by Johnsonville Sausage in Wisconsin.

But the company embraced the authenticity of the sculpture, which it installed this month outside its main office in Sheboygan County. Among other things, the company said, McKenzie, acting as Indiana’s representative, had sent through a photo of the artist that depicted him as fully involved in the project.

Though the company’s owners have said they never spoke directly to Indiana, the image showed the artist sitting in a chair with a “BRAT” print in front of him.

“We’re confident in the provenance of the sculpture,” Stephanie Dlugopolski, a spokeswoman for Johnsonville, said Monday.

Now, however, a publicist who worked for Indiana, Kathleen Rogers, has come forward with a near identical photograph that she says she received from the Indiana camp a year before the “BRAT” sculpture was commissioned. It, too, shows Indiana sitting at a white table with six pens and pencils arrayed to his right.

But unlike Johnsonville’s image, there is no “BRAT” print in the photo. The table is bare.

Rogers said she thought something was off after spotting the image in newspapers this month when the sculpture’s installation was announced. So she began looking through her files.

“I knew I had seen that picture of Bob somewhere,” said Rogers. “I zeroed right in on it. It resonated with me. I knew it was not right.”

Shelly Stayer, who owns the sausage company with her husband, Ralph, said the dispute over the image did not diminish her confidence that Indiana had designed the sculpture. She said she had exchanged multiple emails with McKenzie and others as part of a lengthy and rigorous process that resulted in a design that she believes Indiana approved.

“We have a signed sculpture by Robert Indiana, and we absolutely love it,” Shelly Stayer said. “Nothing else matters.”

McKenzie, who took part in multiple projects with Indiana over the years, including “HOPE,” one of Indiana’s most famous works, said in an interview that he could not say for sure who had taken the disputed photo or sent it to Stayer. But he said it had been taken inside a studio he operated in Maine, on the remote island of Vinalhaven, where Indiana lived for many decades.

And he acknowledged it was possible that someone, perhaps one of his staff, had altered it by adding the “BRAT” print to cheer him up. Indiana had approved the “BRAT” design, McKenzie said, but he had failed to document the artist signing the print displayed in the photograph, as he had hoped.

“Maybe they heard me crying that I missed the shot,” he said, adding: “Nobody did it to swindle anybody.”

The federal lawsuit that challenges how much of a role Indiana had in some of the art sold under his name was filed in May by Morgan Art Foundation, a company that holds the rights to some of Indiana’s works.

In his final years, Indiana lived as a near recluse in an old Victorian lodge hall on Vinalhaven, and the suit asserts that his caretaker, Thomas, intentionally cut him off from old friends and business associates, a charge Thomas has denied.

Dlugopolski said Stayer and her husband had begun discussions about the sculpture idea in early 2017.

A blog post on the Johnsonville website describes the Stayers as art lovers who had previously collaborated with artist Frank Stella on a 3,800-pound starlike sculpture that is also displayed at the company’s headquarters.

At first, the Stayers had hoped to work closely with Indiana, but soon learned that was not to be, the post said. It quoted Shelly Stayer as saying, “He certainly was the temperamental artist as others had described to me.”

According to the post, Stayer had asked that the sculpture “stand vertically,” but that Indiana thought that would make it too tall.

“We later came to agreement on the colors and the design of each letter, and ultimately we were thrilled he agreed to do a sculpture for us,” the post quoted Shelly Stayer as saying. She called the fruition of the project “a dream come true.”

Dlugopolski said the company had also received the print displayed in the version of the photo it had received. The print now hangs, signed and framed, in the Johnsonville headquarters.