Artist depicted American Indian issues in a way that offended many, refusing to pander to society’s stereotypes
When visitors threaded their way into Fritz Scholder’s Scottsdale home, they brushed by stuffed bats, twin witch’s skulls and a vampire defense kit.
Considered dark and obsessed with death, he gorged on life, churning out paintings with a fearless sense of experimentation. Sometimes reclusive, he was a showman who would hop the Concorde to Rome. Known as a painter, he also made sculpture and works on paper. His prints cemented his fame.
“He collected Bibles. He was into history,” said Joseph Sanchez, acting director and curator of “Fritz Scholder: An Intimate Look” at the Institute of American Indian Arts. “He collected some crazy stuff.”
“It was pretty eerie,” said Dennis Yares, owner of the Riva Yares Galleries in both Santa Fe and Scottsdale. “There was actually a room with a re-enactment of skeletal beings sitting around a table. It was like walking through the Field Museum in Chicago. To me, it was the contrast with the bountiful ebullience of the paintings.”
A mass of contradictions, Scholder, who died in 2005 from complications of diabetes, was one-quarter California Mission from the Luiseño tribe. He both embraced and rejected his Native roots. Those iconic paintings of Indians holding a Coors can or slumped on a bar stool rocketed him to stardom after he swore he would never paint an Indian. His father worked as an administrator for an Indian school in the Midwest, but he and his siblings attended public schools.
“They didn’t even see the Indian kids there,” said Paul Chaat Smith, curator of a 40-year overview of the artist’s work showing simultaneously at the National Museum of the American Indian in both New York and Washington, D.C., as well as at IAIA. “It was a very different time; it was all about assimilation.”
By the ’80s and ’90s, Scholder began moving away from overt Indian imagery and toward shadowed mythical beings, the afterlife, landscapes, “mystery women,” and “millennium thoughts.”
Like all of his work, the Indian paintings were about his life and the world that surrounded him.
“It’s a lot about what it meant to call yourself an Indian in the ’40s as opposed to Indian in the ’70s,” Smith said. “I think it was always a regret on his part that he was defined by that sort of work. He would argue later, ‘Look, I’m an artist. I did the Indians for a while, what’s the big deal?’
“The problem is the Indian series made him famous,” Smith continued. “It put him in People magazine with Robert Redford and Ralph Lauren buying his work, so I think it’s disingenuous. It definitely and completely made his career. He was full of contradictions. His favorite word was ‘paradox.’ ”
Fueled by the distorted figures and wild colors of Abstract Expressionism and the political sensibility of Pop art, Scholder taught advanced painting and contemporary art history at IAIA in 1964. There he produced his landmark 1967 “real Indian” series, shattering preconceptions of what Indian art had been up until that time: flat, married to the so-called “studio school,” romanticized, tourist-centric depictions of life on the rez. Scholder’s work attacked this loaded national cliché and corporate guilt with brutal brushstrokes.
“We’ve sort of called that the ‘Sex Pistols’ moment,” Smith said.
In Santa Fe, some accused Scholder of stealing imagery from his own students.
“It’s an ongoing question,” Smith said. Comparisons between Scholder’s work and that of his students — one was T.C. Cannon — do show similarities, he said.
“If the question is who was the first to do the ‘ugly Indian,’ no, I don’t think it was Scholder,” Smith said. “Scholder acknowledged many times in interviews that he learned from his students. He took it further. He acknowledged that it was a very special moment with some extraordinary students.”
“To me, it was a moot point,” Sanchez said. “It created a stimulus that kept Indian art going.”
Turned off by the use of Native imagery to feed Santa Fe’s tourist economy, Scholder was the first to paint a buffalo dancer holding an ice cream cone or a full-dressed Indian in front of the Eiffel Tower. His Indians were more likely to ignore or confront than pander to tourists. The stereotypical “noble savage” was dead.
Today, it’s tough to grasp the shock of Scholder’s “Indian With Coors Beer Can” in the 1970s, Smith said. The work outraged Native elders and white merchants alike. Scholder claimed he had to hire armed guards at his shows.
In 1970, Scholder launched a collaboration with Albuquerque’s Tamarind Institute to produced lithographs of his Indian series.
“He opened up a lot of doors to contemporary Indian artists,” said Bill Lagattuta, Tamarind shop manager, who worked with the artist when he was a student.
“Back then, he was riding high; he was riding a wave. He worked really fast. He could draw three or four stones in a couple of hours. Even before we printed the edition, the edition was sold. People were lining up.”
Simultaneously Indian, American and 20th century artist, Scholder was the first to acknowledge the consciousness of Picasso, Matisse, Goya, Francis Bacon and his own students on his complicated blend.
He splashed paint onto the canvas with the Expressionist vigor of Bacon and Munch.
“It’s obvious he loved color,” said Sanchez, whose studio was “across the tracks” from Scholder’s in Scottsdale during the ’70s. “Maybe that was kind of a Pop mentality. It kind of took the sting out of seeing a massacred Indian. If you ever watched him painting, he was very physical. He’d wipe paint on his shirt, his pants. He was a fast painter. He knew what he wanted immediately.”
To Yares, Scholder was a colorist first.
“We don’t even consider him a figurative painter; we consider him a colorist,” he said. “We’d see blue horses and orange ground. It was almost abstract.”
Yares’ mother, Riva, convinced Scholder to revisit his Indians as a mature artist through his “Red” series of the mid-’90s. Riva Yares was Scholder’s gallerist for about six years.
“It was the idea to go back to that premise as a mature painter and revisit that premise,” Yares said. “The imagery was more cloudy, less monochrome.”
If Scholder embraced life through his paintbrush and his love of brilliant color, he was haunted by death, placing it in the center of daily life. It lurks in the skeletal grin of an Indian at the bar and in the veiled figures of vampires.
The IAIA show contains some of the artist’s last works — paintings about the Iraq war: a helmet crowning a skull. As he spent more time in and out of the hospital, he painted flowers.
“He wasn’t so much dark as very, very determined and serious,” Yares said. “He painted what he wanted to paint and not what would sell. I think that’s the sign of a great artist.”
If You Go
WHAT: “Fritz Scholder: An Intimate Look”
WHERE: Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, 108 Cathedral Place
WHEN: Saturday, July 19, through Feb. 15, 2009.
SANTA FE INDIAN MARKET PUBLIC RECEPTION: 4-6 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 20
CONTACT: 983-8900 or www.iaiamuseum.org
