At Denise René [Robert Indiana: New Paintings and Sculpture] Robert Indiana showed new Autoportraits, the multicolored eagles-within-stars-within-circles that have become his trademark. . . . the variations he carries out on his one theme—the contemporary heraldry of billboards, neon, highway signs and government seals—are never anything less than vital, often to the point of vulgarity. Vulgarity, though, is the name of the American capitalist-commercial game, and if an artist wishes to play it with as much fervor and fidelity as Indiana, he is more or less stuck with this spirit. Generally, Indiana makes the best of things: his wheel-of-American fortune paintings combine a Stuart Davis-like lyric zeal for the signs and slogans of urban surroundings with severe latter-day doubts about their true beauty, all this making for an attractively “loud” formalistic package. Indiana’s use of verbal elements is brutally evocative. All in all, he would seem to be engaged in a brilliantly crystallized love-hate relationship with his “U.S. of A” subject matter.
—Henry Gerrit
Excerpt from "Reviews and Previews," ARTnews 72 (January 1973), p. 19