The Decade Autoportraits suggest, needless to say, a certain dwelling on the ‘60s as the good old days. In another light, however, they are a reworking and improvement upon ideas from the Pop art decade, a rethinking that involved or resulted in clarification. . . .
In the new series each painting follows the same primary design. Each has the numeral “1” superimposed upon an encircled five-pointed star—that wonderfully frontal symbol which can evoke anything from the Pythagorean brotherhood to the. U.S. Air Force. Around the rim of the circle and in the spaces generated by the overlapping forms appear stencillike letters and numbers that record in a talismatic way nicknames, addresses, abbreviated years, and—askew in the center of the star—the “IND” of both “Indiana” and the Independent Subway. How beautiful the names of the downtown streets look, celebrated in Indiana’s affectionate tokens of himself and New York. One thinks of Gertrude Stein’s pleasure when, at the Liberation of France, she heard the names of American places pronounced by the G.I.’s—names, in fact, like Indiana. “Bowery” here appears once in its modern form and once as Peter Stuyvesant knew it (“Bouwerie”) when this was a Dutch-speaking town and it was the name of his farm. This enthusiasm may seem silly outside New York, but municipal patriotism recurs in the history of art. Paris had it, and Fellini’s Roma is a recent example.
The paintings have a concise, cheerful precision that never seems labored. They also have a surprising formal sophistication. The shapes which form between the overlapped graphic figures are themselves sensitively considered as to (constant) shape and (varying) color, as well as comprising a witty take-off on the Cubist technique of alternating colors back and forth across an implied line, and on a drafting table form as well.
—Joseph Masheck
Excerpt from "Reviews: Robert Indiana, Denise René Gallery," Artforum 11 (February 1973), pp. 81–82