Robert Indiana (b. 1928) proved the power of language in his sculpture LOVE, an iconic work of Pop Art. The artist, whose last name was originally Clark, grew up in Indiana. When he moved to New York City in the 1950s, he changed his last name from Clark to Indiana.
Indiana became a leader in the Pop movement. Beginning in the 1960s, Pop artists drew on American popular culture as their subject. They explored mass-media images and consumer culture. Indiana worked with stencils, painting brightly colored words on canvases and discarded materials. He explained “the word is an appropriated and usable element of art, just as Picasso and the Cubists made use of it at the beginning of the century.” Indiana transforms the written word into a subject. He expands this idea in his sculptures, making words into three-dimensional objects. He called himself a “painter of signs.”
The word love had deep spiritual meaning for Indiana, and he depicts it in many variations. He first developed this stacked version in a screen print. The Museum of Modern Art featured the work on its 1965 Christmas card. The image later appeared unauthorized on countless mugs, posters, and key chains, cementing its position as an iconic emblem.
Between 1966 and 1999, Indiana made dozens of LOVE sculptures for cities around the world. This example is on display in Philadelphia in the center of a historic boulevard leading to the city’s art museum, which is visible in the background. The sculpture is as tall as a person, lifted above eye level on a base.
Indiana united Pop Art with the hard-edge painting and abstraction of the late 1950s. These artists focused on geometric abstraction, expansive color fields, and unified forms. Indiana completed many paintings exploring circles, and incorporates these ideas in this sculpture. He explains, “here the quartered field is filled with the four letters of love, as compactly and economically as possible, but with my interest in the circle still called to mind by the tilted o.” The intense color and simplified concept reflect the influence of hard-edge art, while its industrial production is characteristic of Pop Art.
Indiana renders LOVE as a bold, graphic image with crisp edges and a smooth, shiny surface. With visual unity, the letters seamlessly merge into one another. Each letter fits within a 3-foot cube, creating volume and mass. Deep shadows result from the physicality of each letter, and the negative space incorporates the changing color of the sky.