I think of the LOVE paintings as being a one word poem.
— Robert Indiana, in Francine Koslow Miller, “Robert Indiana,” Tema Celeste 20 (January–February 2003), p. 73.
Indiana first began experimenting with his stacked LOVE image in 1964, in a series of rubbings that he sent to friends as Christmas cards. Over the following months Indiana experimented further with this format, painting the first canvases in his LOVE series, including this 12-inch-square red and blue version. It was in 1965 that the Museum of Modern Art, New York, chose the red, blue, green version of LOVE for one of its Christmas cards, through which the LOVE image first reached a wide audience. The image was not, however, originally created for the card.
LOVE was recently on display in Robert Indiana: The Shape of the World, at Pace Gallery, Hong Kong.