Robert Indiana’s Decade: Autoportrait paintings are a series of autobiographical portraits that he began in 1971. The works, which the artist considered a throwback to his American Dream series, consist of three groups of ten paintings in different sizes: 24-, 48-, and 72-inches. The 24- and 48-inch works made their debut in Robert Indiana: New Paintings and Sculpture, held at the Galerie Denise René, New York, November 22–December 30, 1972.
The series provides a portrait of his life in the 1960s, and includes references to important names, places, and events. Decade: Autoportrait 1967 is grounded by the word “Spring,” which refers to Spring Street. Indiana had moved his studio to an old luggage factory at 2 Spring Street in 1965, and lived there until 1978. “Eureka” is a reference to his painting Parrot, a portrait of an uncle who lived with Indiana’s maternal grandparents and had a parrot that would perch on his shoulder. The painting contains the text “EYPHKA,” which was the closest Indiana could come, using his stencils, to the Greek version of “Eureka,” meaning “I found it.”
“Hug” is a reference to one of the three letter words, along with eat, die, and err, which frequently appear in his works; the four words first appeared together in 1963 in The Demuth American Dream No. 5, and each appears in a work in the 48-inch Decade: Autoportrait series. “Hug” in this work, “Eat” in Decade: Autoportrait 1963, “Die” in Decade: Autoportrait 1965, and “Err” in Decade: Autoportrait 1968.
The colors of the Decade: Autoportrait series correspond to the colors he associated with individual numbers. Thus Decade: Autoportrait 1967 incorporates blue and orange, the colors he associated with the number seven, as seen in the painting Seven (1964–65) and the sculpture ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers) (1978–2003).