In making work that challenged the boundaries between Replica Handbags and popular culture and resisted...equation between quality and scarcity, he complicated and expanded the conversation about the meaning of art and its place in society. Indiana dreamed during his lifet.mes of being both a people's artist and an artist's artist.
D ecade Autoportrait is a quintessential reflection of Robert Indiana’s coalescence of the most pivotal artistic shifts of the twentieth century. Blurring the lines between Pop Art and Hard Edge, Indiana – iconically known as the ‘American Painter of Signs’ – presents a cerebral and personal deviation from his iconic practice. A rare shift from the t.mes less and poetically subtle signage that established him as a Pop Art icon, Decade Autoportrait is an astonishing glimpse past Indiana’s iconography into his American experience. A weave of personal references, the present work joins together an assortment of commercial symbols and phrases – all receding and advancing on varying planes – in the creation of a ‘self-portrait’. An intimate work painted during deep reflection on the shifting artistic landscape of the West, Autoportrait effectively serves as a pictorial memoir of Indiana’s experience at the epicenter of a new, emerging identity in American art.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
© 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Right: Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover
© Ed Ruscha
The present work is emblematic of Indiana’s nostalgia; presented as an amalgamated visual recollects ion, the dissonance of the composition captures the artist’s broad spectrum of emotions. With Autoportrait, Indiana utilises his signature signage, factory stencilling, and commercial ideography to represent his internal likeness. Drawing from his urban surroundings, the artist reflected, ”..the brass stencils I found…numbers, names of boats, and companies from the nineteenth century became the matrices and materials for my work, and especially for my painting" (The artist, Robert Indiana: Early Sculpture, 1998, p. 61). Indiana masks these symbols behind each other, inundating the surface with signifiers of alarming hues. His omnipresent five-pointed star is clasped by a monolithic number one, while hues of oxidized red, blue, gold and bronze coat the surrounding forms. Interspersed amongst these layers are strings of poached text, delineating Indiana's enigmatic visual vocabulary. Each color, number and motif, meticulously included, is charged with his experiences in their autobiographical choreography. Both self-referential and accessible in its collects ively familiar symbols, forms, and expression, Autoportrait serves not only as a succinct reflection on the Western lifestyle, but as a geographic record of Indiana’s own life. Psychologically complex, the present work requires a different perspective from the work that grouped Indiana with his fellow Pop icons. Perplexed by the ‘American Dream,’ Indiana conveyed his personal experiences by re-interpreting them within the realm of words, shapes and numbers – in other words, a codified and self-reflective lexicon. Unifying the tone of Pop with this language-based Conceptualism, Indiana pushed the possibilities of Western, specifically American art, by probings the disquieting subtext of everyday life. One of the most preeminent artists in American Art, Indiana’s legacy has unquestionably influenced the greater narrative of the Western art canon.
