Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is happy to announce the launch of “LOVE by Robert Indiana”, an OVR on Artsy dedicated to Robert Indiana’s LOVE including some original works from one of the most famous series conceived by the American pop artist.
From August 21rst to September 16th, 2022, at 1.00 PM.
Invited by MoMA in New York in 1964 to design a Christmas card, Robert Indiana chose the word “LOVE”, taking inspiration from the church’s signs, displaying the sentence “God is Love”. Excerpting only the word “LOVE”, Indiana tilts the vowel O so to represent the instability of human love.
For the Christmas print, Indiana produced the popular design highly known today: the characters L, O, V, and E rendered in a serif typeface are stacked atop one another. The bold red letters stand out against a backdrop alternating bright blue and green. As paired with the curiously tilted O, this color palette implies a sort of playfulness that was making the print immediately recognizable. And the work was a great success, which makes this logo one of the most reproduced and imitated in contemporary art history.
While many people would assume that LOVE was inspired by romantic love, its conception was mostly the product of Indiana’s religious inspiration that was originally springing from the Christmas cards project. This logo would subsequently play a pivotal role in Indiana’s career, being the seed for his LOVE print and a series of sculptures and paintings.
“The LOVE paintings sprang like a crop from that seed planted at your museum, Larry,” he explained in a letter, “the painting you commissioned, Love is God, which burst into mind when I learned that you were converting an old Christian Science Church in Ridgefield . . . for I, as a child, was raised as a Christian Scientist, and the word LOVE was indelibly imprinted in the mind, for there is that slightly different phrase, ‘God is Love,’ on every front wall of every one of Mary Baker Eddy’s houses throughout the world.”
Given the vast number of exemplars produced by Indiana around the Love logo, one might expect he to be in love with the design. Over the course of his career, the artist resented the series, denying any pleasure in the mainstream fame that it brought him.