You know, there is a magic, there’s a definite magic to names. . . . what occurred to me was, Picasso was a name changer too, having started out in life as Pablo Ruiz. Some of his early canvases were signed Pablo Ruiz. I can’t imagine that a man could have achieved what Picasso achieved with an unpronounceable name, at least for the English, and the change was certainly magical for him. It was also extra magical because the PP, Pablo Picasso, back to back, is a mirror monogram. And just by coincidence, he was born in 1881, which is one of those rare mirror dates that anyone can be born on, so I would say, somewhere up there the stars were fixed for him.
— Robert Indiana
Barbarelee Diamonstein, “Robert Indiana,” in Inside New York’s Art World (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), pp. 156–57.