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Lot Essay
The present work is an example of Robert Indiana’s much-revered and easily identifiable LOVE series, which has received on-going global recognition. Contrasting opulent violet and fiery red, the word LOVE is spelled out in a square formation, with the LO stacked over the VE. Indiana first began to explore the potential of this emotion-laden word in his 1958 poem ‘Wherefore the Punctuation of the Heart’ which revealed his admiration of E.E. Cummings and Gertrude Stein. Its first appearance in painted form came six years later when the artist traced ‘Love is God’ onto a diamond shaped canvas, inverting a common church motto of his youth. As Indiana explained, ‘The reason I became so involved in LOVE is that it is so much a part of the peculiar American environment, particularly in my own background, which was Christian Science. God is Love is spelled out in every church’ (R. Indiana, quoted in Robert Indiana, exh. cat., Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain, Nice, 1998, p. 27). The original image that stands today, in the composition we see in the present work, served as a print for a Christmas card sold at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964, before being constructed as a sculpture for the first time in 1970 for the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Robert Indiana’s strong, colourful aesthetic manifests in other single words such as EAT, HUG and HOPE, but it is the LOVE series that has been the most successful, becoming part of our cultural lexicon through its linguistic simplicity and it’s striking geometry. Through his bold typographical design and an alluring unmodulated patina, Indiana produced an iconic work of art that references what is at the very core of human life. Describing the work a ‘one-word poem’, Indiana commented that ‘LOVE is purely a skeleton of all that word has meant in all the erotic and religious aspects of the theme, and to bring it down to the actual structure of calligraphy [is to reduce it] to the bare bone’ (R. Indiana, quoted in T. Brakeley (ed.), Robert Indiana, New York 1990, p. 168). Created with Indiana’s signature chromatic intensity, the present work stands as an emblem of American Pop Culture with arresting visual effect.
Robert Indiana’s strong, colourful aesthetic manifests in other single words such as EAT, HUG and HOPE, but it is the LOVE series that has been the most successful, becoming part of our cultural lexicon through its linguistic simplicity and it’s striking geometry. Through his bold typographical design and an alluring unmodulated patina, Indiana produced an iconic work of art that references what is at the very core of human life. Describing the work a ‘one-word poem’, Indiana commented that ‘LOVE is purely a skeleton of all that word has meant in all the erotic and religious aspects of the theme, and to bring it down to the actual structure of calligraphy [is to reduce it] to the bare bone’ (R. Indiana, quoted in T. Brakeley (ed.), Robert Indiana, New York 1990, p. 168). Created with Indiana’s signature chromatic intensity, the present work stands as an emblem of American Pop Culture with arresting visual effect.