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Label Text An icon of American modern art, LOVE, 1969-1999, is the signature work of the artist. Begining in 1964, Indiana began to create images and objects using the word LOVE. He maintained that a single word could be a viable subject of art by harnessing its emotional charge and the power of language. The artist states, "Here the quartered field is filled with the four letters of love, as compactly and economically as possible, but with interest in the circle still called into mind by the tilted 'o'." With the universality of the word and subject in mind, The Museum of Modern Art selected his image of LOVE as its Christmas card in 1965, and the US Postal Service created a stamp with the image in 1973. It was quickly adopted by the "love generation" and enjoyed mass appeal, which continues today. Other works in the edition of this particular format and colors are in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern in London. "The Art Center is forever grateful to receive this gift from John and Mary Pappajohn for the enjoyment of the community," said Des Moines Art Center Director Jeff Fleming. "LOVE" -- I cannot imagine a more fitting gift as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park this year."
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)

Photo Credit: Rich Sanders, Des Moines
Photo Credit: Rich Sanders, Des Moines
Photo Credit: Rich Sanders, Des Moines

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.

<laughter>