ROBERT INDIANA: FIGURES OF SPEECH, by Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000, 303 pages, $45.

The artist Robert Indiana, who lives on Vinalhaven, is most famous for his LOVE paintings of the mid-1960s, paintings as often ripped-off as reproduced. Nearly everyone is familiar with his motif, the L and O over the V and E like a small apartment building, and the O having been rotated slightly to the right like a football being punted by the L. The primary colors, the optical energy, the play of positive and negative spaces made the design into an icon, a logo for the age, one with such vibrant, brilliant simplicity that many critics praised Indiana more highly as a graphic designer than a painter.

In a new book, “Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech,” Susan Elizabeth Ryan, an associate professor of art history at Louisiana State University, takes the first in-depth look at Indiana’s early and mid-career up to the 1970s. She outlines the major facts of his life and suggests a psychological interpretation of the events in order to show that his paintings, which often appear as impervious to interpretation as the signs on the Maine Turnpike, are really full of hidden references to memories and traumas of Indiana’s childhood.

Robert Indiana is an assumed name. He was adopted at birth in 1928 by Earl and Carmen Clark and was known as Robert Clark until 1958. He never knew his birth mother or father. Although his parents loved him, life was hard. Earl, who worked for oil companies, moved the family constantly around rural Indiana throughout the Depression in search of work. In 1938 a scandalous murder trial involving relatives split the family, leading to Carmen and Earl Clark’s divorce – a momentous event in those days.

Robert had felt his destiny to be an artist as early as age six. After graduating from high school in 1946, he turned down a scholarship to art school and enlisted in the Air Force to be able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill later. In the military, Robert taught typing and ran a base newspaper doing most of the writing and graphic design himself. His love of words (he was also writing poetry) was equally balanced with visual art. For some years he was torn between pursuing poetry or painting.

After the Air Force, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago followed by a traveling fellowship to the University of Edinburgh and a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Finally he began his professional career in a series of abandoned dockside warehouses at the tip of Manhattan in the company of some of the rising stars of the New York art scene like Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin.

Ryan has to interpret this early period of Indiana’s life because although he frequently recounts some of the events, he never says how he felt about being adopted, the poverty and peregrinations, the divorce, or even his mother’s dying words to him in 1949, “Did you have something to eat?”

Ryan examines these events through a lens of myth and psychology, assuming much because little is known. Paramount is the search for identity. Indiana strove, she says, to become the “artist-hero” so that his birth parents might find him and establish his identity. Failing rediscovery and renaming, he chose in 1958 (while working on a painting of the crucifixion) to rename himself. He kills Robert Clark and is reborn as Robert Indiana, giving birth to himself in an oedipal act that makes of his life and work a self-invented myth.

And at the same time, he was struggling to find his artistic identity in a style separate from his influences, his “art fathers.” Ryan also stresses a countervailing thrust in Indiana. Opposing the desire to be famous and found is the necessity to remain hidden, to expose no soft spot of emotional truth that might give another person power over him.

If you know Indiana’s work, you know that, except for the assembled wooden totems (“herms” ) of the late 1950s and early 1960s, his paintings look like signs, sometimes referred to as emblems, game boards, pinball fields, epitaphs, logos, insignias, and dart boards. Circles, squares, stars, stripes, stenciled words and letters, and intense colors predominate. Signs, of course, help us navigate; cross the right bridge, find the hardware store. Indiana’s signs frustrate navigation. They startle with neon-like visual activity; call attention to places; COENTIES SLIP, PORT OF NEW YORK; flash warnings; ERR, DIE, LAW, SEX; commemorate people; JACK (Jack Kennedy); and American Indian tribes; CHOCTAWS, MOHAWKS.

He employs as generic a set of graphic symbols and words as one could ever find. But Ryan explains that when he uses numbers like 37, 40, 29, 66, Indiana is referring to the Midwest highways his parents scoured looking for work and housing. “EAT” refers to his mother’s dying words. About a painting consisting only of the stenciled numbers 9, 8, 7, 6, Indiana says their sum ( 30 ) refers to the 30 pieces of silver Judas received for betraying Christ.

Ryan maintains that the meaning of one of Indiana’s paintings is influenced for the viewer – by the painting that lies underneath, painted out. She says that when Jasper Johns paints numbers they are meaningless cultural artifacts, a means to explore figure and ground. Whereas, Indiana’s numbers are “signifiers in his poetic and autobiographic progress.” She says about the large steel sculpture based on the LOVE painting, “this largest LOVE exudes its theological underpinnings and evokes American Edenic imagery, summoning the writings of Emerson and the paintings of Thomas Cole. Like a concrete metaphor of the pilgrims’ manifest destiny, LOVE is the equivalent of a painting like Cole’s “The Oxbow” (1836).

Really?

There is no reason to doubt that Indiana’s painting are self-referential. He says so himself. The problem is requiring the strength of the art to be sustained by a knowledge of the artist’s history that most viewers would have no way of knowing. Remember the joke about the convicts who tell jokes by merely saying a number; they laugh at “64” because they’ve been in so long the numbers are all they need. One would have to have been isolated a long time with Robert Indiana to “get” some of the paintings. And because the paintings are affectless, they do not lead the viewer to an emotional experience similar to what Indiana may have felt but has hidden. Think of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits: without any specifics one immediately knows what he is feeling and connects it with one’s own sense of mortality.

Ryan refers to many of Indiana’s number paintings as self-portraits. Can one look deeply in to the eyes of the number 6 and come away with an enhanced sense of what it means to be alive? He gives us a specific but no feeling.

There are, of course, exceptions. Indiana’s five American Dream paintings are visually exciting and thought provoking, suggesting that the dream is essentially a game of chance and manipulation, that the individual journey may be full of colorful hoopla but is culturally and spiritually tawdry. The diptych of his mother and father stepping into opposite sides of their Model T, her breast exposed, his feet naked, is charged with curious American eroticism and a sad, wandering loneliness. And Ryan’s discussion of how Indiana’s LOVE paintings wove themselves into the fabric of American cultural lore is fascinating.

Ryan makes the point that Indiana’s paintings can be seen as a defense against his early emotional life. Where there was mess, he’s made order. He presents a symbol of recollection but is mute about its significance. He fills the glass and empties it simultaneously. One is left with marvelous graphic design and the sense of a man who wants to unburden himself but is afraid to, who can only show us the signs of his life because to go deeper is too painful.

The book itself is handsomely produced, the illustrations and color excellent. The appendices include Indiana’s poetry (where his feelings are much clearer) and his statements about his life and work. His own writing is refreshingly clear, unclouded by the artspeak and psychobabble that occasionally mar Ryan’s text.