Photo By Gail

Robert Indiana (1928 – 2918) aspired to become “an American painter of signs,“ noting that “for the last five years I have lived and worked on the Slip and the waterfront, where signs are much more profuse than trees.“

Reflecting on the iconography of American Dream (1961), he related its numbers to “all those dear and much traveled US Routes,“ and the word TILT to the “Pinball Machines and Jukeboxes in all those hundreds of thousands of grubby bars and roadside cafés, alternate, spiritual homes of the American.“

The background of this painting was once another abstract work, demonstrating how the struggling a young artist recycled materials that he could barely anfford and constantly worked his compositions.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York