The Artist Behind LOVE Gets a Fresh Reading in a New Phaidon Book

Robert Indiana, the painter and sculptor whose stacked letters spelling LOVE became one of the most recognizable images in American art, is the subject of a new volume from Phaidon. The book includes an essay by art historian Prudence Peiffer, who takes up the question of what shaped him and how the country he worked in figures into his work. Her reading runs in both directions, treating the artist as a product of American life and American life as something his pictures helped to define. For collectors who have lived with his work on walls and in sculpture gardens, the essay offers a considered account of where that familiar image came from.

With reporting from Artnet News.