The word LOVE got to be the way it is because I have a kind of a passion about symmetry and the dividing of things into equal parts. The word LOVE is that way because those four letters best fit a square if the square is squared by that particular arrangement. And it was really that sort of a necessity for a very compact form that I came upon that arrangement . . . With the red, blue and green paintings the interaction in the eye is of such a nature that with the slightest change of light the fields automatically interchange, the positive becomes negative and vice versa, with almost a violent effect in the eye.
— Robert Indiana
Excerpt from Ruth Bowman and Carl Weinhardt, Jr., Views on Art: Interview with Robert Indiana, WNYC, New York, December 2, 1971, WNYC Views on Art radio program interviews, 1967–1973, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Indiana first began experimenting with his stacked LOVE image in 1964, in a series of rubbings that he sent to friends as Christmas cards. In April 1965 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, and Indiana presented three LOVE paintings in different color combinations, including a smaller red, blue, and green canvas. It was this color combination that was chosen and used on a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card that year. The image became more widely known through the museum's card, however it was not originally conceived for it.