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studies, libraries and living rooms.

Here Indiana worked with a handful of assistants-young men from the island, part-time fishermen-building sculptures, reading, and mapping out new pictorial work. He even devised a four-person chessboard; while he was designing it, he paid his assistants ten dollars an hour to play with him. And he sometimes became so absorbed in his life on the island and in renovating the lodge that he forgot about New York, even refusing to answer the telephone. "New York left me," he explains. "I was already a nonperson. I never knocked on doors, and no dealer came to me."

Indiana slowly acquainted himself with the history of Vinalhaven and discovered that Marsden Hartley and once summered on the island. Near the end of his life, Hartley abandoned abstract art and occupied himself with landscapes, as well as with voyeuristic drawings of virile lobstermen sunning themselves on the beach and hunky, broad-shouldered versions of Cézanne's bathers.

Harley had once cut a swath across Europe, from the salon of Gertrude Stein in Paris to militaristic, prewar Berlin. Most pertinent of all to Indiana's story is that Hartley had become deeply infatuated with a German officer who would be killed in the opening blasts of World War I. In 1914 and 1915, the painter expressed his heartbreak in his Berlin Series, nearly fifty paintings, all laden with symbolic military insignia, Iron Crosses, and flags painted in bold geometric patterns. As Indiana rightly recognized, they are imbued with the same heraldic spirit that characterizes his own work. With their boundless imagery of circles, triangles, checkerboards, zigzags, numbers, and letters, the original Hartleys could almost be Indianas.

Indiana was delighted to discover parallels between his life and work and Harley's, and in 1989, he launched a new series of direct appropriations of Harley's paintings, which he calls The Harley Elegies. "They're a natural for me," he says with excitement. "They liberate me from the symmetry and strict formalism that I had been rather stuck in for some time."

At the same time, Indiana was inspired by Harley's example to return to drawing from life. "I had for a long time wanted to bring the Love from the spiritual into the erotic," he says, and Hartley's work "suddenly spurred me to get back to drawing." While discussing one particular Hartley portrait, Madawaska, in which the male model is wearing nothing except a G-string, Indiana is enthusiastic: "I have always loved that painting because it was one of the first Hartleys that I ever experienced in person. I would love to redo that nude as as homage to Hartley and remove Mr. Hartley's inhibitions - and the G-string."

So began his drawings of phalluses. "And that," says Indiana, "is where the recent difficulties came from."

To be specific, Indiana's recent difficulties began a year ago-when Jason Marriner, one of the young men who worked for him, called the Rockland home of Detective Ernie McIntosh.

McIntosh, thirty-five, a father of three girls, was formerly the patrol deputy on Vinalhaven. According to Indiana, McIntosh "was the island cop, and he bears a grudge." In fact, the townspeople had petitioned to have McIntosh removed from the island two years earlier on the grounds that he enforced the law in an intimidating way.

Despite the petition (which was ultimately dropped), McIntosh denies holding a grudge against any of the locals, including Indiana. "I like Robert Indiana," he says. Yet he describes the island as "a vicious little town with rumors" and boasts that the petition against him was actually "a pat on the back." Indeed, upon leaving Vinalhaven, he was promoted to detective and place in charge of child abuse.

In August, Marriner called McIntosh to ask him about "a friend of his" who had stolen some checks. Marriner wanted to know what the punishment would be if "his friend" was caught. In the course of their conversation, however, Marriner broke down and said that he was the one who had stolen the checks from his employer. He also said that for a number of years Indiana had paid him to pose nude and to "perform oral sex upon him."

As Marriner spoke, Indiana's bank was investigating him for allegedly stealing and forging almost $7,000 in checks. Indiana declares that he would not have brought charges against Marriner. "I have never brought charges against anyone." he says. "It's really the bank... and the state. If I had known that this young man had stolen the money... I wouldn't have done anything."

Nevertheless, Marriner may have gotten wind of the investigation from an unknown source and panicked. He called McIntosh and that's why, in an attempt to explain away his alleged thefts from Indiana, he spilled the beans.

As the detective untangled the twisted love story, he talked to another former Indiana model, John MacDonald, who corroborated the charges and also claimed that "during the posing of [a] nude drawing, Indiana stopped" and made similar advances. And as a result of the claims, Indiana's nude drawings were seized and are being held as evidence of prostitution.

The artist maintains that the prosecutors "have to prove their accusations, and as far as my lawyers are concerned, the drawings don't mean anything." He is nevertheless concerned that Maine is "a redneck state... a very homophobic state," so he has opted for a bench trial (in which he will be tried before a judge without a jury). The case against him is now set to be heard this summer.

Charged with four counts of theft, burglary, and forgery, James Marriner is also awaiting trial. In the meantime, he consigned for sale a number of prints that Indiana had given him They appeared at auction at Christie's New York in May.

For Indiana, love goes on. He recently installed a huge Love sculpture outside the Monte Carlo casino, and the Marisa del Re Gallery, his new York dealer, place another Love sculpture in front of the Grand Palais for the duration of the Paris Art Fair. There's a renewed interest in Indiana's early work; dealers and collectors are quietly scouring personal collections for Indiana's gems. And The Harley Elegies are being taken seriously.

Naturally, love is central to Indiana's Hartleys-brotherly love, the love of art, and mourning for lost love. "The only thing I'm worried about," says Indiana, casting his eyes heavenward, "is, what is Marsden thinking?"

AUGUST 1991