ROBERT INDIANA (1928-2018)

Held in the collection of Mireille and James Lévy since 1989, the present work is a gleaming early instance of one of the best-known forms in twentieth-century art: Robert Indiana’s LOVE. The sculpture depicts the titular letters stacked two by two, in three-dimensional serif type, with the ‘O’ at a distinctive, jaunty 45-degree angle. Realised in shining stainless steel, this example dates from 1966—the very first year that Indiana created a LOVE sculpture, for New York’s Stable Gallery. Shortly afterwards, the Museum of Modern Art requested to use the artwork for its gift-shop Christmas cards. Viral proliferation followed, with Indiana’s stacked, sculptural four-letter word becoming an American Pop icon on a par with Warhol’s soup cans or Lichtenstein’s comic-book blondes.

Emerging from the hippie culture in which ‘peace and love’ was a common mantra, Indiana’s LOVE persists as an eternal symbol of a universal idea, and the ultimate distillation of the artist’s graphic ‘visual-verbal’ forms. The artist had begun to experiment with painting the word ‘LOVE’ around the same time he began a tumultuous and passionate affair with fellow artist Ellsworth Kelly. His portrayal of the word appears to make a cheerful statement, but it also hints at ambiguity. ‘He saw it as a precarious image’, says curator Barbara Haskell, ‘that came out of his disappointments in love—that tilted O suggests the instability of relationships’ (B. Haskell, quoted in “‘LOVE’ and Other Four-Letter Words,” New York Times, May 2018). If Indiana’s LOVE is emblematic of harmony, optimism and fulfilment, it also holds the potential for tension, subversion and even danger—much like love itself. Variations in painting and sculpture reside in public parks around the world, as well as in the permanent collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C..