PORTLAND, Maine — When Bob Keyes, a longtime arts reporter for the Portland Press Herald, began working on a book about the final years of artist Robert Indiana, he knew it would not be a tale of sweetness and light. Having written about Indiana for close to two decades, he had a keen understanding of his subject’s shortcomings.
“He was an odd and tortured soul,” Keyes writes, “even before he arrived on Vinalhaven island, in the 1970s, and took up residency as the sole occupant of the Star of Hope, a dilapidated Victorian structure built for gatherings of men. There, he descended into deeper, dangerous, and more complicated eccentricities with each passing year.”
The story did indeed grow darker, and when Indiana died at the age of 89 in 2018 he left behind an estate worth millions of dollars along with a tangle of lawsuits, accusations, and unanswered questions (where, for instance, are Indiana’s ashes?), all of which Keyes writes about in “The Isolation Artist: Scandal, Deception, and the Last Days of Robert Indiana.”
Much of the unhappiness that surrounded Indiana was his own doing and grew out of his own experiences. Living in 21 homes before he was seventeen left him feeling rootless and reluctant to make deep, lasting friendships. One day he’d be generous, the next mistrustful. “He had a lot of power and he liked to throw it around,” Keyes says. “That doesn’t forgive the many things he did, but he was not in control of his life at the end, and many people were there to take advantage of him.”
What brought Indiana fame and riches was his LOVE sculpture, a work of enduring popularity about which the artist had mixed feelings. Keyes believes that in 50 or 100 years Indiana’s reputation as an artist--not as a person, but as an artist--will still be strong. “He will have accomplished what his goal was,” Keyes says, “which is to create work that will last for a long, long time.”