page_title: Love (sculpture)
section_title: Original inspirations
hierarchical_section_title: Love (sculpture) / Significance / Original inspirations
caption_attribution_description: LOVE Park in Philadelphia (JFK Plaza), just NW of City Hall, showing Franklin Parkway in the background leading up to the Art Museum, the LOVE sculpture, fountain, park, etc.
context_page_description: Love is a pop art image by American artist Robert Indiana. It consists of the letters L and O over the letters V and E in bold Didone type; the O is slanted 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 1965. In much this same form the design soon graced a popular United States postage stamp.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.
context_section_description: 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".
  Indiana got inspired by the work of his former partner, artist Ellsworth Kelly. "He introduced me to Hard-Edge and was a great influence on my work, and is responsible for my being here" said Indiana.
caption: Love Park, officially John F. Kennedy Plaza, with the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the distant background
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