“The idea of the first Dream happened very early on. It’s a pivotal canvas and a crucial one to me. It changed the entire course of my life, and forms a bridge with my earlier work. My paintings now tend to be very bright and high-colored . . . The work I’m doing now, my Auto Portraits, I regard as an extension of the Dream series—my own personal American Dream. In other words, they have become self-portraits. I think of myself first of all as American, then as an American painter painting an American theme. And this will continue.”
— Robert Indiana
Excerpt from Marius B. Péladeau and Martin Dibner. Indiana’s Indianas: A Twenty-Year Retrospective of Paintings and Sculpture from the Collection of Robert Indiana. Rockland, Maine: William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, 1982.