Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech
by: Ryan, Professor Susan Elizabeth

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, May 11, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 303 pages, illustrated throughout. Very clean and tight copy. Although lumped together with Pop artists such as Roy Liechtenstein and Andy Warhol, and often the movement's spokesperson, Indiana and his paintings actually have an uneasy fit in Pop company, mostly because his work isn't grounded in the commodity-oriented (Campbell Soup) realism of most Pop Art. Instead, his work engages with literature and poetry and with the popular rhetoric of the American dream-all permeated by the particularities of his upbringing and life. Ryan's dual accomplishments are in articulating the dynamics of Indiana's art-especially the connections between the artworks and the sources of imagery and themes in his own biography-and in rendering a sophisticated and judicious roundup of the Pop Art movement.