American Indian Theme III (C.162) is the most restrained work in Roy Lichtenstein's American Indian Theme Series — the symbolic imagery reduced to a cooler palette of green, blue, and brown, the picture less densely packed than the preceding works, the individual forms more clearly distinguished from each other and from the ground. Against the chromatic intensity of American Indian Theme II the shift is marked — more meditative, the symbolic elements present as discrete signs rather than as components of a continuous decorative field.

The change in register was consistent with Lichtenstein's serial practice of introducing moments of deliberate reduction at points where the density of surrounding works might otherwise dominate. American Indian Theme III (C.162) served a function similar to Yellow Still Life in the Six Still Lifes or Mirror #7 in the Mirror Series — a clarifying pause that showed the series could make its case with fewer elements and quieter means.

The symbolic imagery drawn from Indigenous decorative traditions carried a different character in this cooler, more open context than it had in the warmer, denser works surrounding it. The geometric forms were more clearly legible as individual signs, their relationship to the ornamental systems from which they were drawn more apparent. Lichtenstein was consistently interested in how decorative systems were structured rather than in their surface effects, and American Indian Theme III (C.162) allowed that interest to surface more directly than the richly layered pictures around it could.

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