Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian
Originally published in Smithsonian’s The Torch, Dec. 2008
Last month, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) made history, launching for the first time concurrent exhibitions at its Washington and New York City locations. Fittingly, the subject of the exhibitions, Fritz Scholder (1937-2005), was himself extremely invested in historyhis own, as well as that of how American Indians were represented in artwork. His work, while often the subject of controversy, heralded a new era in Indian art, despite his complicated feelings about his Native heritage. “Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian” is the first major museum retrospective of the artist’s career and the installation on the Mall features many of the iconic paintings of Native Americans that brought him international renown. His later work, generated after he relocated from the Southwest to the East coast, is on view at the George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan.
Scholder’s death in 2005 fueled new scholarship and a reexamination of the cultural significance of his artistic contributions. “Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian” includes many rarely exhibited paintings on loan from private collections, and associate curator, Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), hopes the exhibition will “lay the groundwork for new ways of thinking about Scholder’s place in art history.” Smith organized the exhibition with Truman Lowe (Ho-Chunk), curator of contemporary art at NMAI.
Before one can understand Scholder’s impact, one must first consider what characterized Indian art prior to his emergence onto the scene in the late 1960s. In the early twentieth century, most American Indian art was consistent with clichés of the Indian lifestyle, romanticizing relationships with nature and the animal kingdom. This quaint style was considered more commercially viable for collectors who wanted Indian art that conformed to their stereotypes. Scholder, who was one-quarter Luiseño, was not raised on a reservation and claimed he did not “grow up Indian.” Lowe explains, “Scholder always insisted he was not American Indian any more than he was German or French, yet he became the most successful and highly regarded painter of Native Americans in U.S. historya fact that raises the question of what ‘Indian art’ actually is.”
After receiving his M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1964, Scholder joined the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. There, he began to develop his own vision of Indian identity in paintings that were unlike anything the American art world had seen before. The first portrait in Scholder’s Indian series, “Indian No. 1” (1967), was so unconventional that Scholder stenciled the word “Indian” in the upper right corner of the canvas to eliminate any ambiguity about his subject matter. The figures in subsequent paintings such as “Indian with Beer Can” (1969), on view for the first time in more than 20 years, and “Indian in Car” (1969) look aggressive and ominouswith teeth bared, they are a far cry from the noble, stoic warriors created by the previous generation of Indian artists. Scholder’s early work unabashedly confronted problems facing modern-day Native communities, such as alcoholism and poverty, and his approach outraged those who felt that focusing on the dark side of Indian culture would lead to further racism.
A little over a decade after establishing himself as the preeminent painter of Indians, Scholder shifted his focus away from the very subject that had made him famous. His work from 1980 onwards contains little Indian imagery and reflects an interest in what he termed “universal and mystical” themes. While still incorporating bold colors, Scholder’s canvases from this period are dominated by demons, winged creatures, and vampires. Playing with perspective and proportion, the large-scale paintings and bronze sculptures from his Possession series (1989) feature solitary figures with small heads and oversized, grotesque bodies. The 1996 trio of paintings“Heaven,” “Hell,” and “Purgatory”reveal a growing preoccupation with mortality, and the most recent work on view, “Self Portrait with a Grey Cat” (2003) depicts a gray-haired Scholder breathing from an oxygen tank, contemplating a pool of blood on the floor in front of him.
NMAI director Kevin Gover (Pawnee/Comanche) expects that “Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian” will prompt new discussions about Scholder’s legacy. “Given our ongoing commitment to contemporary art,” Gover said, “it is appropriate that such a well-timed reappraisal begin here.” The exhibitions remain on view through May 17, 2009, in New York and Aug. 16, 2009, in Washington.