Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech

Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech by Ryan, Susan Elizabeth. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780300079579.

Although lumped together with Pop artists such as Roy Liechtenstein and Andy Warhol, and often the movements spokesperson, Indiana and his paintings actually have an uneasy fit in Pop company, mostly because his work isnt 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. Ryans dual accomplishments are in articulating the dynamics of Indianas 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.