Ryan, Susan Elizabeth; Robert Indiana — Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech

New Haven and London Yale University Press First Edition, First Printing pp. viii, 303. Quarto. Publisher's cloth over boards, lettered in red to the spine. Profusely and beautifully illustrated throughout. Neat ink date to ffep, else, without blemish; near fine. Housed in its original unclipped dustjacket. Near fine. ¶ Provenance: From the personal library of the late Gary Essar (1944-2025), noted Canadian art historian, and curator. ¶ "This book is the first in-depth analysis of Indiana's early career, from his maturation as an artist in the late 1950s, through the early 1970s, the peak of the proliferation of LOVE. Ryan shows how Indiana's oeuvre throughout this period is involved with the rhetoric of the American dream and shaped by the artist's intense engagement with American literature and poetry. The author argues that Indiana's strident visual language emerges from his tendency to recast his life in story and verse, a fact that unlocks complex and secret tissues of figurative meaning within the deceptively simple canvases."