‘LOVE’ and Other Four-Letter Words

A “dangerous commodity, fraught with peril” was how artist Robert Indiana once described the emotion of love. He could just as easily have been talking about “LOVE,” his own signature artwork created in the mid-1960s.

One of the most recognizable images of the 20th century, it is deceptively simple in design: The word “love” rendered in all capitals, its first two letters stacked atop its second two, with the O italicized and suggestively tipped to the right. First a drawing, then a painting, and soon after a sculpture, it would quickly become a cultural phenomenon, gracing everything from book and album covers to postage stamps (330 million sold and counting), cuff links and sneakers. Much of this output was unlicensed and spun far past its creator’s control. Indiana, who died Saturday, had blamed the ubiquitous popularity of “LOVE” for destroying his career, recasting him from a standard-bearer of the 1960s avant-garde into an avatar of kitsch.

“I’m sure all the people who have been born 20 years ago don’t know anything about me at all except ‘LOVE,'” Indiana playfully groused to The New York Times in 2013. “And that’s a nasty word.”

An early version of his famous image would certainly have startled many of his fans.

For her 2000 book, “Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech,” Susan Elizabeth Ryan, a Louisiana State University art history professor, spent considerable time interviewing the artist and digging into his process. She writes that “LOVE” began in late 1964 as a more explicit four-letter word — beginning with F, and with a second letter, a U, intriguingly tilted to the right. After a messy breakup with his on-again, off-again romantic partner and fellow artist Ellsworth Kelly, Indiana had been focusing on word paintings. The two men were in the habit of exchanging postcard-size sketches, with Kelly laying down fields of color and Indiana adding large words atop the abstractions.

“For Ellsworth it was like a joke,” Ryan said, one that Kelly took as a provocation. Moreover, as a devout abstractionist, she said, “Ellsworth was horrified by the idea of having words in a painting. And the more he got like that, the more Robert wanted to take it seriously. During the era of postpainterly abstraction, just the fact that it was a word — any word — was subversive.”

The word in question was certainly in the air as a pointedly political gesture within the circles Indiana followed — from Ed Sanders’ similarly titled mimeographed poetry magazine to Lenny Bruce’s controversy-sparking performances.

Yet by December of that year, Indiana had shifted his artwork’s four letters to LOVE, using it for a set of handmade Christmas cards he mailed to friends and shelving its blunter precursor. The director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York saw one of the cards and asked Indiana to do a mass-produced version for the museum’s gift shop. By the end of 1965, MoMA’s “LOVE” card was a best seller, and unauthorized knockoffs were appearing, including aluminum “LOVE” paperweights from the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia. Indiana doubled down, licensing his own “LOVE” jewelry, working on variants in painting form and eventually moving off the canvas into three-dimensional versions.

This G-rated linguistic alteration did not stem from self-censorship or marketing, said Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the organizer of its 2013 retrospective, “Robert Indiana: Beyond Love.” She ascribed it to Indiana’s canny aesthetic instincts, at least circa 1964: “Love has a bit more nuance to it than” its cruder four-letter cousin. That latter word “is a one-dimensional verb,” she said, adding, “It’s too flat-footed; it doesn’t leave anything to the imagination.”

By contrast, she said: “Love is such a timeless, universal concept. Yet his graphic portrayal of it identified, on the one hand, a punchy affirmation of the term, and on the other hand, very deep feelings of fear. He saw it as a precarious image that came out of his disappointments in love — that tilted O suggests the instability of relationships.” For a gay man in 1964 — when just stepping inside a gay bar could lead to arrest — Indiana’s wary outlook on love was hardly unfounded. The problem, Haskell continued, was that he never moved on. Seemingly stuck in a creative rut, he did gallery show after gallery show of “LOVE” pieces. The image’s popularity in the culture at large “gave his work the sense that it was commercial and he had sold out for this one image,” Haskell said, “and that nothing he did after it was quite as good.”

That perception — and the subsequent indifference by many collectors and curators — led Indiana to leave New York in 1978 and move to a small, isolated island off the Maine coast. But he apparently took the early carnal version of “LOVE” with him. Ryan recalled possibly seeing it during one of her visits to interview Indiana at his home in the ‘90s.

But good luck finding it now amid daunting piles of old newspapers, sketchbooks from his teenage days and a dizzying array of maquettes and studies for even further “LOVE” artworks. “My guess is it’s in there somewhere,” she offered.