Robert Indiana talked about the origins of his iconic artwork “The American Dream”

“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 Dream is still dark, and full of the blackness of the paintings I did when I was very depressed on my arrival in New York. It’s a comment on the superficiality of American life; its images are taken from pin-ball machines and the neon glare and the road signs of America. When I did that painting, I had no idea its theme would occupy most of my life.” - Robert Indiana

The American Dream- Take all:

My “model” was Mae West (appearing at the time of execution of this painting on the television Late Late Show in “Night after Night” – 1932) who is the most American bloom to have flowered on this “scene,” which, in my case, is obviously *A*M*E*R*I*C*A*N*, and loaded with “personal,” “topical,” and “symbolic” significance, namely all those dear and much-travelled U.S. Routes: #40, #29, #37 (on which I have lived) and #66 of U.S. Air Force days; those awful five bases of The American Game; the TILT of all those millions of Pin Ball Machines and Juke Boxes in all those hundreds of thousands of grubby bars and roadside cafes, alternate spiritual Homes of the American; and star-studded Take All, well-established American ethic in all realms—spiritual, economic, political, social, sexual and cultural. Full-stop.

Norma Jean-Marilyn Monroe:

The rise and fall of the Flesh Cult in Hollywood, the birth and demise of one more celluloid goddess only pall in an enormous way, having gone through the gamut in the ’30’s when going to the movies was substitute for a baby sitter, but Marilyn Monroe was a cut above the ordinary and made the tired old money-making ritual worthwhile again—almost. It was probably her pathetically human, incredibly vulnerable image she exposed on the consciousness of America and the Americanized world. Jean Harlow might have received similar homage in her day if certain artists had been born a generation earlier. Or the Hoosier Carol Lombard whose tragic death during the Second World War—setting off from Indianapolis after a bond rally—affected me more personally, but her death didn’t really become Americana, the Dream. The little California orphan girl whose every dream was fulfilled did win her legend and became the terminal symbol of the Lotus Land the world grew weary of. An irony indeed that her role in “Misfits” was not only her final appearance on the screen, but the vehicle of farewell for her costars Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift as well. The last film for all three. Six divided by two. ’26 the year of her birth; ’62 the year of her death. At two baby Norma Jean was almost suffocated by a hysterical neighbor; at six a member of one of her 12 (6 x 2) foster families tried to rape her. In ’52 (26 + 26) when she was 26, her most cherished ambition of all was realized when she starred in a dramatic role and, in the first week at the Manhattan box office, the film grossed $26,000. Death came by her hand on the sixth day of August, the eighth month (6 + 2 for the last time.) This odd run of numerical coincidences only buttressed my fascination with the subject once I had become intrigued by the metamorphosis of her name itself.

From the letters of her original name someone drew—almost anagrammatically—those of her fame. Three were added; three were subtracted. Six again. In gray. Encircled by the telephone dial-like ring of her destiny and death (it was this instrument she was clutching) Marilyn is posed—in the cosmetic colors of her much vaunted femininity—against the golden star of her dreams though its tips, however, point to the letters I MOON. Her stylized image comes, of course, from the famous nude calendar “Golden Dreams,” which, upon finding by chance in a Greenwich Village shop called “The Tunnel of Love,” I turned over and discovered that our last Goddess of Love had been printed in Indiana.

Highball Redball Manifest: 

HIGHBALL ON THE REDBALL MANIFEST is an old American railroading term for the signal “All-Clear for a fast express,” which is probably how I rather immodestly thought of my own progress in the pop-roaring year of 1963. However, with the assassination of President Kennedy the “big train” and many little locals got seriously derailled [sic]. I painted HIGHBALL because my paternal grandfather was a locomotive driver for the Big 4, which occupation he called, as I remember, “engineer”—accurate but, nevertheless, confusing. He was a gruff, moustachioed proper Victorian from the plains of Kansas and passed on his interest in railroading to his son who worked briefly for the Pennsylvania Railroad some time before I entered the scene. That the canvas should hang in the Allentown Museum for many years seemed very appropriate.

In fact, the grays of this predominantly grissaille [sic] work were taken from the same paint jars that provided the palette for my diptych portrait MOTHER AND FATHER which was begun in 1963, too, but not finished until 1967. Since HIGHBALL ON THE REDBALL MANIFEST is a head-on view of an old steam locomotive—with the address, “25,” of my second Coenties Slip studio imposed upon its boiler as its number, it stands with the Model-T Fords of MOTHER AND FATHER as my only excursions into the mechanical genius of America, a theme I could have explored much further—but, alas! I was side-tracked by LOVE.