It’s very obvious given the Whitney show [Marsden Hartley, March 4-May 25, 1980] and the repercussions of the Whitney show, that Hartley had been really about forgotten and neglected. And since I live here in Maine, and since he’s Maine’s most famous artist, I thought it was proper to revive an interest in him as much as possible. He deserved it. He had a terrible, terrible life. Tragic life. And it simply followed like my homage to Demuth with my Number 5 paintings and my Brooklyn Bridge which started as homage to Stella, Joseph Stella, but ended up being more of an homage to Hart Crane. . . . With all three it’s the subject matter. I mean I lived intimately with the Brooklyn Bridge for years, it was right out my studio window. With Demuth it was that poem by way of Carlos Williams, and just the fact that it was the number five and I was involved with numbers and with the Hartley the interest came about from another curious coincidence, and that is just as Hartley had a German military friend, I had a German military friend. And when I came to Vinalhaven to live here permanently I found out then, that in 1938 he had also lived in Vinalhaven. And that series of coincidences just gelled into a complete determination that that would be my next series of paintings.
— Robert Indiana
Excerpt from Susan Elizabeth Ryan, interview with Robert Indiana, July 19, 1991, Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech Archive 1987–2005.