Pop artist known for LOVE sculptures

PORTLAND, Maine — Pop artist Robert Indiana, best known for his 1960s LOVE series, including the LOVE sculpture in Philadelphia where an untold number of couples have had their photos taken, died at his secluded island home off the Maine coast

Indiana died Saturday from respiratory failure at his home in a converted Odd Fellows hall, a fraternal order lodge on Vinalhaven Island, 15 miles off the mainland, said his attorney James Brannan. He was 89.

While the artist’s endearing image of LOVE is instantly recognizable around the world, the man behind the art grew up in a household where the word “love” was never spoken, and he never found a lasting relationship, said Barbara Haskell, curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

“The word was never used in his family growing up. He had a complicated relationship with the word,” Haskell said.

Indiana created a lifetime of art but he’s best known for LOVE, spelled with two letters to a line and with a tilted “O.” It’s been transformed into sculptures around the world, sometimes in different languages, from Spain to Israel to Japan.

Indiana, who was born Robert Clark in the state of Indiana, left behind the art scene in New York and retreated in 1978 to Maine, living on Vinalhaven.

His desire for solitude was legendary. He told The Associated Press in 2009 that he moved to his house — which a benefactor bought for him — when he needed a place to go after his lease ran out on his five-story studio and gallery in the Bowery section of New York City.

“In some ways he was perhaps seen as the proverbial one-hit wonder because ‘LOVE’ was so immensely iconic and immensely huge in pop culture,” said Dan Mills, the director at Bates College Museum of Art. “For better or for worse, it overshadowed some of his other contributions.”

Haskell compared the image with American Gothic, the painting by Grant Wood of a man with a pitchfork and a woman in front of a farmhouse. The public knows those images even if they don’t know the creators, she noted.