Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937-2005)
Indian Rug #5, 1972
Acrylic on canvas
80x68 in. (203.2 x 172.72)
Ochre, blue, and red lines pulsate up and down a field of lavender, its edges marked in scarlet and black. Fritz Scholder’s Indian Rug #5 reinvents a Navajo Germantown eye-dazzler blanket in Pop art’s splashy palette and the artist’s signature loose brushwork. Best known for his vividly hued, often violent depictions of Native people, Scholder’s wide range of subjects includes explorations of dreams, landscapes, and still lifes. A few years prior to completing this work, the artist resigned from teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he began painting Native American subjects and developed his mature style in collaboration with his students. Yet the colors, the insistent frontal presentation, and subject of Indian Rug #5 distantly echo the brightly lit, saccharine still lifes of Wayne Theibaud, whom Scholder studied under prior to moving to Santa Fe. Here, Scholder takes Theibaud’s matter-of-fact sensibilities to their furthest limits, while also toying with the transformation of paint into subject. Where Theibaud’s impasto-heavy paintings of desserts appear to transform oil paint into cake frosting, here, too, Scholder plays loosely with the concept of trompe-l'œil. By extending the image of the textile across the span of the canvas, Indian Rug #5 functions not only as still life, but also as a proxy for the very object it portrays, with the painting’s stretcher bars metaphorically transformed into the beams and tension bars of a loom. This object-image duality is reinforced in the red and black border, which nods to the cord that keeps a blanket taut on the loom while its weaver works.
The work was painted at a moment when institutions throughout the country were reconsidering the artistic value of American textiles. Two years prior, the Whitney Museum of Art’s 1971 exhibition, Abstract Design in American Quilts drew parallels between the abstraction coursing through American art in the post-War era and the designs of nineteenth and twentieth century quilts.1 A year later, artist Anthony Berlant’s touring exhibition of nineteenth century Navajo blankets, including those from the collections of Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Kenneth Noland, became the first major museum show to focus on a specific Native American artform. Scholder almost certainly saw the exhibition, which included both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum as its venues, and the date of Indian Rug #5 suggests that the show had a strong impact on his artistic practice.
Fig. 1. Unknown Navajo (Diné) artist, nineteenth cenutry eye-dazzler blanket from Berlant and Kahlenberg, The Navajo Blanket.
The catalogue for The Navajo Blanket expounded on several groundbreaking ideas. “This is a selection of eighty-one women artists,” Berlant and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, catalogue’s authors, declare, firmly insisting on the historical importance of women’s contributions to abstraction.2 Moreover, the authors point out that in their traditional cultural context and in the process of their creation on the loom, nineteenth century Navajo blankets were often encountered vertically—like paintings.3 The exhibition included a number of eye-dazzler blankets, some of which bear close resemblance to Indian Rug #5 (fig. 1). Navajo women began weaving these blankets after the introduction of aniline dyes in the late 1880s, which allowed for a greater range of colors than previously possible. Berlant and Kahlenberg point out that while technical weaving quality declined during this period, weavers began creating textiles with an extraordinary range of expressive abstraction. The authors refer to the improvisation of the blanket’s imagery during this time as “jazz-like.” 4 They note that the agitation of the abstractions echoed the tumults of Navajo society in the late nineteenth century, after the Navajo people returned from their deportation and imprisonment at Bosque Redondo during the 1860s. .5 In depicting a major Native art form in the language of late twentieth century painting, Indian Rug #5, much like Berlant and Kahlenberg’s writing—and perhaps unintentionally—makes the point that Indigenous women been fluent in the language of abstraction for generations prior to its mainstream art world debut.
1
Jonathan Holstein, Abstract Design in American Quilts, (New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971).
2
Anthony Berlant and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, The Navajo Blanket, (New York: Praeger, 1972), 28.
3 Ibid, 15.
4
Ibid, 20.
2
Ibid, 25.
Image courtesy Larsen Gallery.