LOVE – All Works

Label Text

Between 1964 and 1966, American artist Robert Indiana developed the simple composition LOVE. Spelled with fire engine red letters, two stacked over two and the letter “o” tilted at a buoyant angle, LOVE is one of the most iconic symbols of the 20th century. Indiana’s LOVE sculpture in the Art Center’s John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park is part of a lineage of LOVE artworks and byproducts that includes rings, paper weights, and United States postage stamps. Though it earned Indiana fame, and the composition has been reproduced countless times since its creation, the artist’s personal history with love was complicated. As a young artist living in New York, Indiana eventually rented a top-floor loft on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan for $30 per month. He was in incredible company there, sharing the building with artists Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and the painter Ellsworth Kelly, with whom he began a relationship.

When the two artists ended their turbulent love affair in 1964, Indiana produced a painting entitled FUCK. At the time, Indiana was painting in a style highly influenced by Kelly’s flat, hard-edged color works, but employing areas of color to better articulate the shape and centrality of letters. Although Indiana never exhibited FUCK, its composition — two letters stacked over two — proved extremely fundamental to the creation of the LOVE image familiar today. For the 1964 holiday season, Indiana produced Christmas cards based on his composition, but instead of the profane term, he substituted another four-letter word: “love,” with the “o” slightly askew on the top line. Indiana’s jaunty, poetic design caught the attention of the Museum of Modern Art in New York the next year, which commissioned the artist to design a Christmas card after the LOVE image. Inspired by the colors of the Phillips 66 oil company logo, the letters for this iteration of LOVE were colored a highly saturated red. Four years later, Indiana commissioned Lippincott industrial fabricators to produce a twelve-foot Cor-ten steel edition of LOVE.

Installed in 2019 in honor of the Pappajohn Sculpture Park 10th anniversary, the Art Center’s LOVE joins over 70 large-scale LOVE sculptures around the world. Often incorporated as the background for a social media post or a marriage proposal, the sculpture is beloved by Des Moines. Though part of its history is associated with a deeply-felt breakup, Indiana evolved the idea into a more enduring and universal — and much embraced — statement.

Published References"John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park", Lea Rosson DeLong, ed., Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, 1923,pp. 84-86, details pp. 4-5, 87

DimensionsOverall (sculpture): 96 × 96 × 48 in., 1300 lb. (243.8 × 243.8 × 121.9 cm, 589.7 kg.)
Overall (sculpture with base): 102 × 98 × 50 in., 1550 lb. (259.1 × 248.9 × 127 cm, 703.1 kg.)

Accession Number 2019.32

Classificationssculpture

CopyrightARS

Inscriptions66-99-315 2 (underside of base, written in black ink)

EditionEdition of five and two artist proffs

MarksC 1966-1999 R INDIANA 3/5 (cast on inner bottom edge of letter E); MILGO BROOKLYN NY (cast on inner bottom edge of letter E)

Paper/SupportBase weighs 250 lbs

ProvenanceArtist; Morgan Art Foundation, Ltd. [acquired from the previous]. Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich [acquired 2007]. Private Collection. (Sotheby's, New York); Des Moines Art Center [purchased from the previous, 2019]

Images (3)

Audio (3)

Audio Transcript

Robert Indiana (American, 1928 – 2018)
LOVE, 1966-1999

Run Time (Introduction): 0:50
Recorded by Jill Featherstone, Museum Education Director

The following audio has been shared with the Des Moines Art Center courtesy of the Association for Public Art, Philadelphia and was produced by Lu Olkowski. It was recorded in 2010 as part of the Association’s Museum Without Walls AUDIO program and features an edited conversation with the artist himself, Robert Indiana who died in 2018, speaking with writer Adrian Dannatt about Indiana’s LOVE body of work. Listeners will note that the color described in the Philadelphia version, which was created in 1976 and is owned by the City of Philadelphia, is different from the version in the Pappajohn Sculpture Park, which doesn’t include green. While this variation in color has a slightly different aesthetic, the point is for listeners to carry forward the graphic and pop culture influences on this project as a whole.

Audio Transcript

Robert Indiana (American, 1928 – 2018)
LOVE, 1976 (installed in Philadelphia)

Run Time: 3:50
Recorded by Robert Indiana and Adrian Dannatt as part of the Museum Without Walls™: AUDIO program, Association for Public Art, Philadelphia and was produced by Lu Olkowski

Robert Indiana: All my work is autobiographical. In some way it is connected with my, with my, own life you see.

RI: I am Robert Indiana and this is my LOVE sculpture.

Adrian Dannatt: And I’m Adrian Dannatt, and I’m a writer who’s written a great deal about Robert Indiana, obviously about the LOVE sculpture, or the LOVE project as one should really call it, because there is so much more than a sculpture.

AD: The sculpture that we’re looking at here in Philadelphia is part of a worldwide project in a whole variety of media. From the poem that he wrote as a young man, through paintings.

RI: And there’s thousands of them.

AD: Through t-shirts. Through prints. And through sculptures in every different language.

RI: All over the world.

RI: I used to work for the Indianapolis Star, a newspaper, and I was very close to the composing room. I set my poems in lead type myself, so that my work is very typographic.

AD: And of course the great innovation, it was the tilting of the letter O onto this diagonal.

RI: It gives four letters a little bit of dynamism.

AD: It was this diagonal that turns the word into really what is a perfect square.

RI: Only a hundred times more dynamic. There’s nothing as dumb as an O at attention, I mean, you know.

AD: Although many things from his childhood, as with many artists, things from their childhood that artists are hardly aware of, which then later emerge.

RI: The LOVES all come from the fact that my father worked for Phillips 66.

AD: The gas company.

RI: My mother would drive my father to work and pick him up. We would pass the Phillips 66 station with a huge circular sign in the sky. The gas pumps were red and green. The uniforms were red and green. The oil cans were red and green. And so it’s the red and green of the Phillips 66 sign against the blue sky, why the first LOVE was red, blue, and green.

AD: He realized the potency and the power of colors, especially colors put together clashing and combining. So it has this great drama to it. The snap, the crack, and the pop of a classic pop icon.

AD: The poem that he wrote in 1955, which is really the inspiration for this work that comes a more than a decade later, which is quite straightforwardly entitled, When the Word is Love.

RI: Give it feeling. Give it feeling.

AD: And it goes like this.

RI: Do it slowly.

AD: Dent the head
With the word.
See the lettered scar
On the skull.
On the bone
(in the beginning)
The straight line,
Wherefrom the rounding
Circle is beget,
But on our tongues (audio fades out, but poem actually continues)

AD: It’s almost a description of the geometrical elements that make up the physical composition of the word love. It’s very curious because it’s almost he’s unconscious of the fact this idea was germinating. That he expressed it as a young man, in a poem of all things.

RI: I consider LOVE a one sentence poem.

AD: And his dream is to have these LOVE sculptures in every city in the world. He wants this message to be absolutely universal.

RI: It would be my intention that, ah, everybody should have love. And there are a lot of people in the work, you know.