An exhibit at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art highlights his powerful and influential Indian paintings.
[block pos=”right”] “Scholder tackled questions such as ‘What does it mean to be an American Indian?’ ‘What does it mean to be stereotyped and marginalized within the larger culture?’”
— Bruce Hartman, Executive Director, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art [/block]
Forty years ago, Fritz Scholder (1937-2005) reset the course of American Indian art when he embarked on a series of powerful figurative depictions of lone Indians in a state of existential crisis. The canvases were large, many nearing nine by six feet, balancing zones of emotionally charged color with energetic brushwork. They were also controversial — among Indians as well as non-Indians — for their unconventional take on a subject long fictionalized by conventions.
Scholder’s paintings such as Mad Indian, Insane Indian, Indian with a Can of Beer, had nothing in common with well-known historical portrayals by George Catlin, Frederick Remington and Edward Curtis.
Scholder aimed to paint real Indians, not the noble savages and mythic exemplars of a vanishing people that long dominated American art. He also rejected the romantic stereotypes of Hollywood and the tourist industry. In a 1975 interview with Winona Garmhausen, he remarked that “nobody had painted the Indian the way he is today.”
“Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967-1980,” an exhibit at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art through Sept. 18, chronicles Scholder’s determined effort to paint ”the Indian the way he is today” through more than 40 paintings and lithographs created between 1967 and 1980.
“He was a trailblazer,” said Bruce Hartman, the Nerman’s executive director. “Painting in the late 1960s and ‘70s, he preceded the focus on identity issues in art which would later follow. Scholder tackled questions such as ‘What does it mean to be an American Indian?’ and ‘What does it mean to be stereotyped and marginalized within the larger culture?’”
Organized by the Denver Art Museum, where it opened in October 2015, the exhibit is a perfect fit for the Nerman, where contemporary American Indian art is a significant focus of the museum’s collection, and works by Wendy Red Star, Jeffrey Gibson, Brad Kahlhamer and others are regularly on view in the galleries.
“This was an opportunity to present the man who was a forerunner, who helped pave the way, empowering younger artists to pursue an independent vision outside of tradition,” Hartman said.
“We’re the only contemporary art museum exhibiting this show,” he added. “It’s critical to get this art in front of new audiences, to move the work outside the confines of museums well known for Native American or western art.”
Hartman’s admiration for Scholder goes back decades, to 1977, when Scholder had several works on view at Halls on the Country Club Plaza, during the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s 1977 “Sacred Circles” exhibition. “He exhibited a huge six-by-six-foot portrait titled Indian with Typhoid. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I was awestruck!” Hartman stated.
Scholder, an enrolled Luiseno tribal member and son of a Bureau of Indian Affairs school administrator, once swore that he would never paint Indians, but his impatience with stereotypes won out. His Indian paintings are works to be reckoned with: confrontative, truth-telling, angry, anguished, encompassing the realities of alcoholism and homelessness as well as the white man’s treachery.
In works such as Indian and Contemporary Chair (1970) and Indian in Car (1969), he painted the Indian’s inner demons for all to see. Both show their subjects seemingly screaming in anguish in contemporary settings.
In many of his paintings, Scholder makes the viewer acutely aware of the Indian’s role as misfit and outsider in contemporary society. Insane Indian No. 26 (1972) looks like he doesn’t have a friend in the world; Monster Indian (1968) is no monster; rather the image reads as a portrait of vulnerability.
A keen sense of irony runs through works such as Indian at a Gallup Bus Depot, showing an Indian wearing a cowboy hat and boots and leaning against a shooting machine. It’s seen from the side, so one can only wonder what targets are portrayed within.
And then there is the celebrated Super Indian No. 2, caught taking a break from a tourist performance. He is a hulking, imposing presence in his buffalo robe and horned headdress, but he is also as far removed from the world of his forebears as the pink ice cream cone he holds in his hand.
The power of Scholder’s themes is reinforced by the power of his style and skill as a colorist. A student of Wayne Thiebaud at Sacramento Junior College, Scholder rebelled against the flat, decorative Studio Style of American Indian art popular with tourists and promoted by The Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School. Instead he joined the contemporary art fray, turning the vocabularies of Pop, Abstract Expressionism and Color Field to the needs of his own expression. The work of British artist Francis Bacon, which Scholder saw at the Tate Gallery in London during a 1969 trip, made a lasting impact.
The scale and intensity of Scholder’s works made them impossible to ignore at a time when the American Indian Movement occupied Alcatraz, marched on Washington and held a 71-day protest at the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, seeking to force the federal government to fulfill its treaty responsibilities and respect Indian civil rights.
Scholder’s Indian paintings include depictions of historical violence, such as Massacre in America: Wounded Knee (1972), and satirical responses to Hollywood depictions. In works such as Seated indian with Rifle (After Remington) (1976) and Indian and Buffalo After Catlin, he anticipates postmodernism, taking well-known images by other artists and infusing them with his own critical perspective.
The Nerman exhibit also includes a selection of Scholder’s lithographic prints that traverse many of the same realities — historical violence, contemporary alcoholism, Hollywood stereotypes — as his paintings. One of the most striking is Indians with Umbrellas (1971), a remake of the American Westerns trope of a formidable line of Indians on horseback advancing on the horizon.
In a rare moment of levity, Scholder outfits them with colorful sun umbrellas, endowing the scene with the celebratory air of a foxhunt rather than a gathering of warriors.
A half century later, many of the realities Scholder painted persist: American Indians continue to endure the highest rate of poverty of any race group; they continue to battle racism and stereotypes and to push the government to fulfill its treaty obligations.
What has changed, notably, is the growing number of American Indian artists achieving mainstream recognition. Among artists, Scholder was pretty much a lone voice when he placed Indian peoples’ issues front and center all those years ago. As the Nerman’s collection documents, there is a chorus of strong voices now.
