The American artist’s care for sculpture is more illustrious than the Mona Lisa. What a pity most people don’t know that he made it – and that he didn’t copyright it in the 60s
When Pope Francis came to the US recently,he was greeted by a very American artwork. On the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, just behind the platform where the pontiff held an outdoor mass, and was a monumental red and blue sculpture – four letters,stacked two by two, to read AMOR. It’s a Spanish-language variant of an artwork so ubiquitous that it’s exceeded its artist’s career, and indeed the boundaries of art itself.“I just find it fascinating that it’s travelled so far,” says Robert Indiana. The American pop artist, who’s now 87, and is sitting in his island home off the coast of New England,reflecting on his 60-year long career ahead of his first British exhibition in a decade. His work care for, with its four letters stacked in a square and its O at a jaunty angle, or is so illustrious that many millions of viewers may not even realise it’s an artwork at all. But it is an artwork – one that hovers over Indiana’s career like a helicopter,and that has obscured nearly all his other work over the past six decades.
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Source: theguardian.com