With the discovery of the Indian subject in 1967, shortly after he joined the staff of the newly established Institute of American Indian Arts, Fritz Scholder taught many young Indian artists to break from the romanticized and stereotypical representations of Native peoples prevalent in nineteenth century images and narratives and on Hollywood film and television Westerns. The presentation of Native people lacked the reality which Scholder observed growing up around reservations in states where his father, a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee, moved the family. He also recognized that his students were already addressing the subject in their own styles and media as the era of hippies, alternative lifestyles, communes, and experimentation made everything associated with Indians acceptable and "groovy."

       Scholder recognized at an early age that to be identified as Indian carried implied meanings in which race and tribal identity were significant issues. He understood that his own mixed blood heritage, part Native, part European-Anglo, was a non-issue for him but became an important political factor in the growing Ethnic Power Movements throughout the country during the 1960s. As numerous scholars have pointed out, Scholder’s initial reluctance to identify himself as Indian had, by 1976, become important to the marketing of his art and to his commercial success.¹

      Portrait of an American is one of several in a series of paintings which featured the chiefly Chief, an Indian in full regalia that could be inspired by today’s powwow dancers or a nineteenth century photograph. Scholder’s deconstruction of the romanticized image of Plains Indian is achieved in the simplification of details to form large color blocked areas and with obscure—but identifiable—tribal regalia shapes that are held by and draped over the sitter. Primarily a colorist painter, this period of Scholder’s work featured agitated, linearly constructed bodies with the splatters of pigment to suggest the speed with which he attacked the canvas. Little effort is given to construct a portrait of the subject’s face beyond highlights to cheeks and brow. The mouth is a slash of red, and a full eagle feather bonnet melds into the shoulders of the figure. There is a dynamic force to the stance as the line of the blue blanket trails from the lower corner of the canvas to direct the eye upward toward the figure from right to left. In his hand is a staff trimmed with fur and hawk feathers. He wears moccasins of white with blue cross motifs that identify him as Northern Plains and, if a powwow dancer, he would be classified as a “traditional northern-style straight dancer,” the most elegant dancers at the social gatherings in Indian Country. In this context, Portrait of an American is a type of solitary figure which intrigued Scholder throughout his career. He stated once that “I never know when a series will begin or end. I like that surprise.”²

      Although Scholder felt he exhausted the American Indian as subject of his work and sought other media and cultures to explore, he returned to Native subjects again and again. Through world travel, education, and interaction with communities of Indigenous peoples over his lifetime, Fritz Scholder created uniquely and distinctive Native American imagery. In doing so, Scholder moved the history of art by artists of Indian ancestry forward, past a point from which it can never go back. The legacy of contemporary art and artists who are exhibited internationally, in major art museums, and in collections of non-Native and Natives stand uniquely beside Scholder in the canon of American art.

¹Scholder’s critical statement on his lineage is often misquoted to imply a denial of his Native heritage, but he was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Mission Indians on his grandmother’s side. He also identified himself as “one-quarter German, one-quarter French, and one-quarter English, and in a way that is what my painting is….I consider myself a painter. I’m happy that I seem to have influenced a few Indian painters. I’m also glad that I’m part Indian. But what I most want is to be known as a painter….” John Lukavic, "The DAM's New Exhibition Highlights Native Artist Fritz Scholder," Denver Art Museum, October 16, 2015, https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/blog/dams-new-exhibition-highlights-native-artist-fritz-scholder.

²Joshua C. Taylor, William Peterson, et al, “Paintings, Drawings, and Graphics,” in Fritz Scholder, (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), 17.


Image courtesy Larsen Gallery.