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Decade Autoportrait 1963

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© 2013 Morgan Art Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York


Decade Autoportrait 1963

1971
oil on canvas
48 in. x 48 in. (121.92 cm x 121.92 cm)
Henry Melville Fuller Fund, 2012.49

Robert Indiana
American
1928–2018

Description

Decade: Autoportrait 1963 is a square image consisting of bold, hard-edged geometric shapes, cardinal numbers, proper names, and declarative words, layered and transposed upon one another in saturated hues of deep red, black, yellow, and white. A large number one forms the foreground of the image, transposed with a five-pointed star and a large decagon, encompassing various geometric shapes. Each edge of the ten-sided shape signifies one year of the artist’s life in the 1960s. The composition of the words and numbers contained within the work mimics the die-cut stencils and logos of commercial signage, inspired by brass stencils from the 1800s that the artist found in his Coenties Slip studio on the lower Manhattan waterfront. Railroad-style lettering lends a kinetic urgency and movement to the image. A strong sense of place and time are established with the inclusion of directional indications and place names. The artist laid out his design in pencil and then painted it with an oil-based paint, applied thinly and evenly. Faintly visible beneath the number “3” is a trace of earlier painting by the artist, called a pentimento, that once included the word “THE”.


On the reverse of the canvas is the artist’s signature stencil, in white paint within a circle, which reads: “Indiana 2 New York 71.” As included on the reverse of other paintings within the Decade: Autoportrait series, the number two in this stencil may denote a personal reference to the artist’s favorite number: “Obviously it’s number 2. That’s the number of love; it takes two to love. It’s been the chief preoccupation of my life.” 1


Context and Analysis

Decade: Autoportrait 1963 is one of ten paintings that Indiana created in 1971, as meditations upon the time he spent in Manhattan during the 1960s when he gained international fame. The series of ten is complemented by two other series with the same title, one of which measures 24 x 24 inches while the other measures 78 x 78 inches. The smaller of those two series was made in 1971; the paintings in the larger series were completed from 1972 to 1977.


Although frequently identified with the Pop Art movement, Indiana has consistently sought to distance himself from this label, insisting that his work consists of nonironic, literal images, which nonetheless have the potential to carry deeply personal significance: “I am an American painter of signs, charting the course. I would be a people’s painter as well as a painter’s painter.” 2


Decade: Autoportrait 1963 exhibits the artist’s characteristically abstract manipulation of language, shapes, and numbers. Embedded within the repetitive, iconic, populist imagery drawn from American commercial culture are cryptic allusions to highly subjective autobiographical motifs. “IND” here is shorthand for the artist’s home state, as well as his chosen moniker (the artist’s birth name is Robert Clark). “EAT” is often associated with Indiana’s mother, who spent the artist’s childhood working in roadside diners, and whose last words to her son were, “Did you have something to eat?” 3In this composition it may also reference the artist’s hunger for success during the early 1960s. This work exhibits a disquieting juxtaposition of the profoundly personal with the collective vernacular of commercialism. This points to Indiana’s preoccupation with the optimism and dissonance associated with the idea of the American Dream, a theme Indiana often addressed in his work. 4


Connections

The Currier Museum collection also includes Indiana’s portfolio Decade (1971; Currier, 2013.4.1, 2013.4.2 ,2013.4.3 ,2013.4.4 ,2013.4.5 ,2013.4.6 ,2013.4.7 ,2013.4.8 ,2013.4.9 ,2013.4.10 ), which consists of ten prints featuring the artist’s reproductions of some of his most important paintings created in the previous decade. The portfolio also highlights Indiana’s interest in American cultural history and timely humanitarian subjects from the civil rights movement to nuclear disarmament. Indiana’s critical look at the American Dream throughout the portfolio resonates with other socially engaged work in the museum’s contemporary collection, including Marisol’s The Family (1963; Currier, 2005.12) and Glenn Ligon’s Invisible Man (Two Views) (1991; Currier, 2010.22.a,b ).


The Currier Museum holds works created by artists who were instrumental in the development of Indiana’s practice, such as Charles Demuth (Currier, 1960.22), Marsden Hartley (Currier, 1959.2), Stuart Davis (Currier, 1995.3), and Ellsworth Kelly (Currier, 2013.27). It was Kelly who urged Indiana to move to a studio at Coenties Slip.


Written by Grace-Yvette Gemmell

Notes
1Quoted in Ebony 2008.
2Quoted in C. J. Weinhardt, Jr., Robert Indiana (New York, 1990), 79.
3Ryan 2000, 18.
4“I paint the American scene (a non-provincialism, for, in truth, this has become in large part the world reality) in an American way (automatically & perforce this reads new) which is a style characterized by high color (combustible polychromy), high relief (the hard-edged rationale), high poetry (the sharp focus metaphor), high refinement (a classical idealization), & high endeavor (commensurate with the best and the most awful American tradition of lofty purpose), or, more Hoosier-graphic words: my art is a disciplined high dive—high soar, simultaneous & polychromous, an exaltation of the verbal-visual . . . my dialogue.” Indiana, Artist Statement: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/images/detail/robert-indiana-artists-statement-12951 (accessed June 29, 2014).



Bibliography

“Denise René Gallery, N.Y.: Exhibit.” Art International 17, no. 2 (February 1973).


Ebony, David. “The Perennial Optimist: Robert Indiana.” Art in America, November 1, 2008: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/the-perennial-optimist-robert-indiana/ (accessed June 29, 2014).


Indiana, Robert. Artist Statement, between 1962 and 1968. Smithsonian Archives of American Art: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/images/detail/robert-indiana-artists-statement-12951 (accessed June 29, 2014).


Ryan, Susan Elizabeth. Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.


Exhibition
1972 Galerie Denise René, New York, NY, "Robert Indiana." Nov. - Dec.

2013-2014, Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH. "Signs from the Sixties: Robert Indiana’s Decade" Nov. 27, 2013 - April 27, 2014

2017 Currier Museum of Art. "Seeing Red in the Collection" June 23, 2017 -Jan. 2018

Provenance
Galerie Denise René, New York, NY
Anonymous sale, Leslie Hindman, Chicago, IL, lot 130, December 5, 1986
Private Collection
Christie's, New York, lot 162, May 9, 2012
Private Collection
G. W. Einstein Company, Inc., New York, NY
Purchased by Currier Museum of Art, 2012


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