Although he was famous for his stacked-letters sculpture LOVE (1965), Robert Indiana (1928-2018) sure didn't radiate or generate much of the emotion. He was inclined to abruptly fire people, not show up when he was supposed to and cancel plans (including with President Obama); he was also arrested for (and acquitted of) soliciting minors for sex in 1990. But Indiana's moral failings weren't behind the mess that became of his estate during the final years of his life, as Maine journalist Bob Keyes documents in The Isolation Artist: Scandal, Deception, and the Last Days of Robert Indiana, a spellbinding cautionary tale about the tricky business of mixing art with commerce.
Keyes approaches his first book with a scholar's attention to detail and a muckraker's doggedness. He interviewed not only Indiana, who took his surname from his home state and spent the latter half of his life on a small island off the coast of Maine, but a good chunk of the book's cast of characters, a curiously large number of whom had checkered pasts when they met the artist or would go on to create problematic futures for themselves. The Isolation Artist's most intriguing personalities figure in the litigation-generating grudge match between Indiana's art publisher, who was accused of fabricating and then selling work attributed to the artist, and his agent, who consulted for a company that was accused of underpaying Indiana. Nevertheless, Indiana died with $5 million in the bank. As the song says, all you need is LOVE. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer