. . . what I’m doing is equating my paintings with my poetry. In other words they are concrete. The LOVE is a concrete poem as far as I’m concerned. Just a one word poem. Repeated so endlessly by myself, and it’s a little bit like, shall we say, like Gertrude Stein. Just don’t stop using a word, you see . . . Remember there’s another aspect about love and of course this really comes through in [the poem] "Wherefore the Punctuation of the Heart." Love is a noun and a verb and so one must decide what my love is. It’s a command, love, and it’s a subject, love. It is an exercise, and grammar is one of my favorite subjects.
— Robert Indiana, interviewed by Susan Elizabeth Ryan, January 13, 1991
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, and in April 1965, when the Junior Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, invited the artist to submit a work of art for its Christmas card program he presented three LOVE paintings in different color combinations, including this black and white version. Although the LOVE image became more widely known through the Museum of Modern Art Christmas card, the image was not originally conceived for it.