“Love is a noun and a verb and so one must decide what my love is. It’s a command, love, and it’s a subject, love. It is an exercise, and grammar is one of my favorite subjects.”

—Robert Indiana

Bold, vibrant and deceptively simple, Robert Indiana’s ‘LOVE’ composition is one of the most recognizable artistic arrangements of the twentieth century. Consisting of four capital letters stacked in a perfectly square format with a distinctively tilted ‘O’, this singular motif has come to define the prominent American Pop artist and it features repeatedly across his prints, paintings and public sculptures. 

                 

Indiana began to explore the power of language in his artworks during the early 1960s. ‘LOVE’ first featured in a 1961 painting titled 4-Star Love, with the text stenciled across the bottom of the canvas in a linear fashion. Clearly fascinated with the creative possibilities offered by the word, the artist continued to experiment with the arrangement of the four letters in informal rubbings of red colored pencil on paper. In 1965, the now-instantly recognizable composition was finalized and first disseminated to the public as a Christmas card commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art. Rendered in Indiana’s signature hard-edged style of block colors and sharp lines – an aesthetic inspired by his partner at the time, the artist Ellsworth Kelly – the design subsequently became one of the museum’s most lucrative cards and the image was informally adopted as an emblem of the ‘Love Generation’.

“…what I’m doing is equating my paintings with my poetry. In other words, they are concrete. The LOVE is a concrete poem as far as I’m concerned. Just a one word poem.”

—Robert Indiana

The Book of Love, created in 1996, is Indiana’s most elaborate project focused on this iconic motif, with the artist reworking the image through a total of twelve different colorways, each accompanied by a poem written by the artist. Bestowed with titles such as “When the Word is Love”, “To Draw a Straight Line”, and “Wherefore the Punctuation of the Heart”, Indiana’s poems are an ekphrastic description of love: the noun, the verb, the screenprints. Displayed together, the artist manifests love as object and idea, with his screenprints and poems perfectly encapsulating Indiana’s lifelong fascination with symbols and language.