Robert Indiana's Painted Poem! LO VE

The iconic work "LOVE" by Robert Indiana

ART:

THE VALENTINE of the art world

Robert Indiana's "LOVE" 

graphic prints, paintings 

and sculptures.

Born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, artist Robert Indiana designed the colorful LOVE graphic in 1964. He first stacked the letters in a poem he wrote in 1958, in which LO was on top of VE. 

Indiana's best known image
is the word love in upper-case letters,
arranged in a square with a tilted letter O.
He has created it in many color combinations.

Some old stencils he found, inspired him to paint words and changing his last name to Indiana was another way of showing how important words were to him. Other words he has painted include EAT and HOPE.

His hard edged graphic style, the bright colors and billboard-like images are common in artworks from the 1960's "Pop Art" movement. 

the US Postal Service
 issued a first class stamp
 with Indiana's LOVE image on it
 in 1973.

This LOVE image has become one of the few extremely well known and popular Icons of art - along with the farming couple in American Gothic and the Mona Lisa, to name a few.

Much of the beauty of this art comes from the Century Schoolbook Ultra-Bold stencil letter forms he based this type on and the negative specs created between the letters. 

Indiana's HOPE sculpture.

His large sculptures of individual NUMBERS (9s or 5s or 2s, etc.) may be his second most popular artworks. Several of these large numbers are in front of buildings around NYC.

A dilsplay at the Indianapolis Museum of Art showing Robert Indiana's "Numbers."
 (1980-1982 - A gift to the museum by Melvin Simon and Associates.)

For Valentine's Day in 2011 Indiana created a variation of his LOVE for Google's search engine website, which they used in place of their logo.

(Sources: Wikipedia and sever online sources.Robert Indiana tried to copyright the image but was turned down  because it is a common English word.)

Until later,
Jack

ARTSnFOOD, is an online publication dedicated to "The Pursuit of Happiness, the Arts and Food." ™ All rights reserved. Concept, Original Art, Text & Photographs are © Copyright 2013 Jack A. Atkinson under all International intellectual property and copyright laws. All gallery, museum, fair or festival photographs were taken with permission. Images © individual artists, fabricators, respective owners or assignees