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"The rip-offs kept me from being a billionaire, although I would never have done those things anyway. But they soured the art world on the image of my Love."

After the card came the ring. In 1966, Indiana contracted a small firm called the Beautiful Bag and Box Company of Philadelphia to produce a hundred rings bearing his Love motif. These, says Indiana, quickly became the fashionable things for New York's richest ladies to wear. Then Indiana mounted an exhibition at Stable, an entire galleryful of Love. To promote the show, the gallery printed a Love poster and circulated it around town. Although the poster helped make the show a huge success, there was something missing from it that had an enormous effect on Indiana's future career--the copyright symbol. 

Around the same time, a well-known poster company also published a poster, which Indiana says omitted the copyright notice. And within weeks, he says, the cat was out of the bag: "When the rip-off people discovered that there was a print I had been involved with that carried no copyright symbol, it killed my legitimacy as an artist. 

"I sent off the necessary papers to the United States Copyright Office and was advised that a word cannot be copyrighted. I was ill-advised, [but] that was the advice I got, and I just became discouraged. I'm not litigious. I don't sue people. People who sue people are interested in money. Besides, I don't know who they all were. 

"Love has since gone into a hundred different variations. You walk down the street these days and SALE is written SA on the top and LE on the bottom. But the really painful rip-off was Love Story." Indiana says that someone approached Erich Segal, author of the best-selling novel, and asked him if he felt any guilt about the similarity between the book jacket's design and Indiana's painting and Segal replied that the artist should feel honored. 

According to art dealer Marian Goodman, whose Multiples company collaborated with Indiana on some of the artist's own editions, "There was really inadequate copyright for artists then--that came later. We tried to defend the copyright, but it couldn't be done because we were up against companies that were too big." Among them was a big cosmetics company that produced thousands of Love rings as a promotion. 

"The rip-offs kept me from being a billionaire, although I would never have done those things anyway," says Indiana. "But they certainly soured the art world on the image of my Love. Only two museums ever acquired Love paintings, and I think that's immediately a result of people's just presuming that I had been responsible for all this junk that flooded the world." 

Indiana's response was to be fruitful and multiply. With Multiples, he forged six twelve-inch, carved-aluminum Love sculptures (last year, one went for $35,000 at Christie's). For RCA, he authorized a Love record cover for Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie. Then came a Love cross, a banner, a diptych, and a silk-screen edition in collaboration with Mass Originals, art collector Eugene Schwartz's company, in both a signed edition of one hundred and an unnumbered edition of thousands (which sold out at twenty dollars each). In 1970, Indiana made twelve-foot, three-dimensional Cor-Ten steel version of Love that was sold to the Indianapolis Museum for $75,000. In 1972, he did an edition of six-foot polychrome Love sculptures. And in 1973 came the Love stamp, for which the U. S. Postal Service paid him an honorarium of $1,000. 

As opposed to the rip-offs, he says, all of the above is art. "I don't call it junk. Nor do I call my original Love ring junk. It happens to be a very beautiful object. I still wear it." 

STABLE GALLERY CLOSED IN 1966, After rival galleries had skimmed its cream. "They lost everybody," Indiana says. "Andy left. Marisol left. For six years I had no gallery." It was one of the things that finished off his career. "How marvelous it would be to have one important dealer in your life," he says wistfully. "This business in New York of the artists jumping from dealer to dealer I find absolutely repellent. That's one reason I stayed at the Stable Gallery too long. I, too, should have left. It was a sinking ship. But I didn't. I remained loyal until it just became impossible." 

In 1972, he signed with the Paris dealer Denise René, who was opening a space in New York and wanted at least one American artist among her European ones. But that didn't last either. "Denise opened at a very bad time, when the recession began," says Indiana. "By 1978 she closed." By this time, Indiana was also losing his loft and had gone through a few lovers, notably the women's clothing designer John Kloss. What's more, the former pop artist's career was also on the skids. "Fashion comes and goes," he says, "and I was no longer invited to be in the Whitney Biennials....I thought that having a show every six years, that scarcity and rarity, might possibly work to my advantage. It didn't. "So in 1978 he packed up and moved permanently to his vacation home on the distant island of Vinalhaven, Maine.

VINALHAVEN ISLAND LIES IN THE FOG just out of reach of the prettiness of New England. The closest port is Rockland, and the nearest landmass to the east is France. The region is quintessential rural Maine. Robert Storr, a refugee from Maine who is now a curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, calls it the Appalachians of the North. 

Indiana hauled two trucks on twelve trips from New York to his new home. There were hundreds of canvases and prints and thirteen cats and dogs. His former Odd Fellows men's lodge is still undergoing restoration, and Indiana has been forced to sell his valuable Twomblys at Sotheby's to finance the repair work. Inside his creaky but comfortable château there is space for all of his art to be arranged according to period and media, as well as numerous studios and

                                                              CONNOISSEUR