Artist Robert Indiana Media Cor-ten steel | Dimensions 3.66 m x 3.66 m x 1.83 m Created 1970 | |
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Similar Marble sculpture, The Kiss, The Rape of Proserpina, Numbers 1‑0, Psyche Revived by Cupid's K | ||
LOVE is an iconic pop art image by American artist Robert Indiana. It consists of the letters LO over the letters VE; the O is canted sideways so that its oblong negative space creates a line leading to the V. The original image, with green and blue spaces backing red lettering, served as a print image for a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card in 1964. In much this same form the design soon graced a popular US postage stamp.
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LOVE's original rendering in sculpture was made in 1970 and is displayed in Indiana at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The material is COR-TEN steel. Indiana's LOVE design has since been reproduced in a variety of formats for rendering in displays around the world.
Original inspirations
MoMA historian Deborah Wye describes Indiana's image as "full of erotic, religious, autobiographical, and political underpinnings" that make it "both accessible and complex in meaning. Megan Wilde offered more detail about the autobiographical origins in an article for Mental Floss magazine, "[T]he word love was connected to [the artist's] childhood experiences attending a Christian Science church, where the only decoration was the wall inscription God is Love. The colors were an homage to his father, who worked at a Phillips 66 gas station during the Depression". She quotes Robert Indiana as describing the original colors as "the red and green of that sign against the blue Hoosier sky".
Acquired associations
Indiana's image was quickly adapted upon its appearance in the 1960s by the hippie free love movement and again in the 1990s by skateboard enthusiasts after skateboarding was banned in Philadelphia's LOVE Park.
Versions
Versions of the sculpture now exist in Hebrew, Chinese, Italian and Spanish, as well as the original English.
The image has been rendered and parodied in many forms. The original book cover for Erich Segal's novel Love Story alluded to the design, and the TV series Bridget Loves Bernie included a shot of the Sixth Avenue sculpture in its opening credits. The first opening sequence of the Skip Beat! anime includes the image in the initial frames. The United States Post Office issued an eight-cent stamp in 1973 featuring the image. Parodies of the image appeared on covers of records by Rage Against the Machine (Renegades), Oasis ("Little by Little" single) and Acen (75 Minutes). London artist D*Face parodied the image by rendering the word "hate" with the "A" tilted and Belgian artist Eddy Gabriel made a version using the word "lost". The sculpture is remade to read "THPS" in the Xbox expansion of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, which has a stage set in Philadelphia's Love Park. The set reappears in Tony Hawk's Underground 2.
In 2003, the iconic letters were painted on a tennis court next to the Nike SF-89L Nuclear Missile Site behind the abandoned Public Health Service Hospital in the Presidio of San Francisco, California. According to conceptual artist, Erik Seidenglanz, the letters are proportional to the tennis court, identical to Robert Indiana's LOVE typography are painted in white and a mirror image of it. This LOVE court can be found in the History Imagery timeline of Google Earth
On February 14, 2011, Google posted a special Valentine's Day edition of its logo based on the famous image.