Putting his stamp on love: the man who bent the O in LOVE is everywhere this summer. Catching up with 75-year-old out painter Robert Indiana.

"I'm sure President Bush wouldn't enjoy me hanging a peace painting in the White House," says Robert Indiana. While Bush doesn't seem like much of an art buff anyway, he certainly wouldn't think much of Indiana's new antiwar canvases, recently unveiled at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. The paintings feature brashly colored peace signs, some upside-down, with even brasher slogans, like PENCE PLUNGES IN DESPAIR.

"I don't think there's much hope," Indiana says. "It seems to be the malady of mankind not to be able to live with his fellow man."

The 75-year-old pop artist is famous, of course, for a decidedly more upbeat sign--his iconic LOVE logo, which today might conceivably be read as a symbol of gay pride, with the slanted O embracing difference. Not that Indiana had that message in mind when in 1964 he put his design to a holiday card for the Museum of Modern Art; as with other gay pop artists of the time, his homosexuality was best kept discreet, if acknowledged at all.

Nowadays, though, Indiana has thought more about the off-kilter angle. "It's the direction of an erect you-know-what," he suggests.

His oblique language is telling, considering that Indiana was never able to come out to his parents. "The terms, the language, the ideas never seemed possible," he says. His father worked for the Phillips oil company, and the old Phillips 66 gas station sign, with its green and red hues set against the blue of the vast Midwestern sky, would become a life-long inspiration for Indiana. Its impact is the focus of another exhibition, at the Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, Okla., through July 4.

Being gay was not any easier in New York, where abstract expressionism and its raging machismo were peaking when Indiana arrived in 1954. "I never went to the Cedar bar, because I might ran into Jackson Pollock, and I did not want to run into him," Indiana recalls. "He was a womanizer. All of the abstract expressionists tended to be womanizers and boozers--and I'm neither." Instead, he befriended Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, who found him a neighboring studio on Coenties Slip, a stretch of waterfront near the Brooklyn Bridge. Indiana still has a chic geometric bandanna designed by Kelly, even though the two lost touch years ago.

The only out artist he knew was Warhol, whose shadow still looms large. "I have a tendency, since I started out my career with Andy Warhol, to forget about him," Indiana says. The two of them had their first solo shows jointly at the Stable Gallery in 1961, and Indiana was the focus of Warhol's 1964 film Eat. Eventually they grew apart, due in no small degree to the silver wigged one's penchant for publicity and partying. "He cultivated the whole thing," says Indiana, "and I wouldn't want to have paparazzi trailing me."

There's also the fact that Indiana's work never received as much attention as Warhol's--one reason he left New York in 1978 for the obscure island of Vinalhaven, about 15 miles off the coast of Maine. There he lives in a ramshackle 19th-century building, a former In dependent Order of Odd Fellows lodge. "It's quiet, quiet, quiet [there]," Indiana says. The morning after the packed Kasmin Gallery opening, he's sitting in a friend's spacious all-white apartment overlooking the Hudson--and the West Side Highway. "Just opening the door and hear hag this traffic, it's difficult."

Not that life hasn't some times been difficult in Vinalhaven: In 1990 In diana was arrested on charges of hiring a male prostitute and later acquitted. And he remains disappointed that he never had a major museum show in New York. Then again, Indiana's LOVE, gay or otherwise, is known the world over, thanks to mass reproductions (and the fact that he has no copyright). That, four-letter word is immortalized on everything front key chains and floor mats to a phenomenally successful 1973 American postage stamp.

"In somebody's desk drawer in probably every city in the world there's a LOVE stamp," Indiana says. "That's kind of nice."

Kennedy is a reporter for New York magazine.