The FT’s Ariella Budick does a bang-up job charting the rise of Robert Indiana’s work in the wake of the Pop Art ascendancy and providing an eye-opening mini-biography of the reclusive artist whose work—and story— is hardly what it first seems:

“LOVE” sculptures will proliferate in London this October – 13 of them, along with a host of other works divided among the Waddington Custot Galleries and their temporary outposts at Frieze and PAD. Over the last decade, Indiana has had his first New York gallery show in 20 years, ornamented the median along Manhattan’s Park Avenue with a series of number sculptures, and crafted a “HOPE” logo for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. The market has noticed: in May 2011, a 12-foot “LOVE” – one in an edition of three identical pieces – sold for $4.1m.

This late-life surge reprises the celebrity that Indiana fled in 1978, when he retreated to Vinalhaven, an island of 1,200 people 15 miles off the coast of Maine. He lives alone in a large, mansarded Victorian-style house, rarely answers the telephone, and assiduously avoids journalists.

Locating Love in a Chilly Climate (Financial Times)