Robert Indiana’s LOVE
The inspiration came from his childhood as a Christian Scientist, when the phrase “God is love” was prominent. Indiana inverted the idea to suggest that “Love is God.
The first LOVE painting was a small canvas in 1961 called 4-Star
Love, which was the word “love” with four stars stacked above it and that was really the inspiration for stacking the letters.
The motif first appeared as a series of rubbings in 1964 on
his personal Christmas cards.
[In 1965] MoMA asked him to design a Christmas card. Inspired by his recent painting, he chose the single word ‘love’, the letters of which he arranged on two lines to fit the card’s square format better. To create a more interesting design he angled the ‘o’. Indiana submitted several colour variations. The museum chose
the one with red letters against a blue and green background.
Few Pop images are more widely recognized than Indiana’s LOVE…[it]has appeared in prints, paintings, sculptures, banners, rings, tapestries, and stamps. Full of erotic, religious, autobiographical, and political underpinnings—especially when it was co-opted as an
emblem of 1960s idealism—LOVE is both accessible and complex in meaning. In printed works, Indiana has rendered LOVE in a variety of colors, compositions, and techniques. He even translated it into Hebrew for a print and a sculpture at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem
The Misty Miss Christy 