Review: Fritz Scholder's closeted Indian art

Arts & Entertainment

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

"It would be easier to believe that Fritz Scholder was conflicted about his identity -- was he a Native American artist, or an artist who happened to be one-quarter Native American? -- if he hadn't been quoted as saying, "Fine art is still the best racket around."

That line appears in a short film accompanying a of Scholder's work at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. It's to the museum's credit that the curators are so upfront about the controversy that dogged Scholder's career, his lifelong insistence that he wasn't really an Indian, even as he grew rich and famous painting garish and confrontational images of Indians. It's hard not to walk through this exhibition and smell more than a whiff of fraud going on.

It was a complicated fraud, though, maybe so complicated that the fraud itself approaches the level of art.

Scholder, who died three years ago, was born in 1937, in Minnesota, to a father who was half-Indian and worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Despite this connection with his Luiseño past (a native people from Southern California), Scholder said he grew up outside native culture, "off-reservation," and was never educated in the notorious Indian schools that left many of their graduates angry and confused about their place in American society.

When he went to Santa Fe, N.M., in 1964 to teach painting and art history at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Scholder was firmly devoted to being an abstract expressionist. And he famously declared that he would never paint an Indian -- and encouraged his students to do likewise. One of his early paintings, from 1961, seems to capture the intensity and hollowness of his commitment to abstraction. "The Paradox" is a field of gray and black, under what may be a red horizon or a suggestion of blood. Crudely suggested faces emerge from the canvas, as if Scholder is flirting with an idea he doesn't have the courage to embrace."

Get the Story:
An Artist's Identify Theft (The Washington Post 12/9)