A Closer Look at

While most recognized for his vivid and often challenging portraits of Indians, Fritz Scholder did not identify himself as Native American until his late twenties. He has since become a major influence on Native American art and the next generation of artists.

An important work by Scholder, "Dartmouth Portrait #8," was offered in our Modern Native American Art auction in Los Angeles on 31 August 2022. Here, Ingmars Lindbergs, our Native American Art Specialist, gives us a closer look into the life of Fritz Scholder and this remarkable painting.

Fritz Scholder

Early Life

During his lifetime, Fritz Scholder was frustrated by his work being contextualized as exclusively Native American. Being of heterogenous ethic heritage with French, English and German roots, Scholder was only one quarter Luiseño on his father's side. He grew up in the Midwest before his family settled in California in the 1950s.

Scholder later studied under Wayne Thiebaud at Sacramento City College. There the artist embraced West Coast abstract expressionism and was introduced to the Pop art movement; he counted Francis Bacon, Nathan Olivera and Richard Diebenkorn as early artistic influences.

Career

By the late 1960s Scholder was himself teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). It was there that he broke a promise he had made upon his arrival in Santa Fe: to never paint a Native American figure. Frustrated by what he felt was his students’ inability to render an “honest” portrayal of American Indians, Scholder created “Indian No. 1” in 1967. At the time, Scholder explained that his subjects were “taken from old photographs, for I have no direct identity with my Indian heritage…." These early depictions quickly developed into a figural style that he would refine throughout his career.

Rejecting the stereotypical romanticized clichés of Native Americans found in the artwork of the period, Fritz Scholder’s Indians “might as well have been from another planet, a very dark and disturbing one several thousand light years from Santa Fe. These Indians were loafers and drinkers and wise guys, which would have been shocking enough, but it was Scholder’s distortion, his disfigurement of the human form, and his unnatural, jarring blending of colors, that suggested a profound disconnect between the tourist-approved vision of Native life and the gritty reality he observed every day.”

Fritz Scholder

Lot 35. Fritz Scholder. Dartmouth Portrait #8, 1973. Sold for $378,375.

Dartmouth Portrait #8

Resigning from the IAIA in 1969, Scholder traveled through Europe and North Africa before returning to Santa Fe to continue expanding his work. Within a year he had held his first one-man show. He was invited to lecture at numerous art conferences and universities including Princeton and Dartmouth College, and it was during his residency in Hanover that this series was created. The 1972 exhibition of the Dartmouth Portraits at Cordier and Ekstrom in New York received favorable reviews and brought awareness of Scholder’s talent to the larger art world.

Dartmouth Portrait #8 showcases Scholder’s energetic brushwork with his confident depiction of the subject. He slyly alludes to his skills as a colorist by highlighting primary earth tones with slivers of shocking pink. In addition, the painting is a masterful blend of the media conventions of pop art and the technical expertise of abstract expressionism.

This portrait was displayed prominently for decades in the dining room of a lifelong friend and collector of Scholder, who acquired the painting at the 1972 New York exhibition. Today Dartmouth Portrait #8 remains a testimonial to the vision of the artist and his place as not only one of the revolutionary progenitors of Modern Native American art, but as a key figure in American art history of the twentieth century.

For further information on Native American Art email Ingmars.Lindbergs@bonhams.com

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