Essay
In the introduction to a 1975 monograph, Fritz Scholder boldly announced, “I lead several different lives and function in a number of different locations and realities” (Introduction 24). It is perhaps then not surprising that he completed many self-portraits, of varying media and styles, during the course of his career.
His attraction to the genre can be considered in terms of two potential goals. First, self-portraiture can be an exercise of liberation, of depicting emotions that are normally contained. Shortly before the creation of Laughing Artist (Self Portrait) Scholder reflected, “Some people wonder why I make pictures showing intense emotion, such as my self-portrait entitled ‘Screaming Artist’, while I am a rather reserved and gentle person. My answer is that my work is a catharsis for me. By putting my frustrations and turbulent emotions into my work, I release my tensions and become more gentle” (“On the Work” 111).
But self-portraiture put on public display extends beyond the internal realm to the relational, as it presents an artist to viewers. Scholder’s use of self-portraits might thus be seen as a way of offering his own visual self-definition to an audience–an act of particular importance for someone continually labeled by others as an “Indian artist.” He complicated this categorization in his 1979 exhibition catalogue Indian Kitsch, where he asserted, “I am a non-Indian Indian. I do not feel the pull of the dichotomy of two cultures. However, I am aware of the incongruous nature of the two cultures” (qtd. in Traugott 42).
Within Scholder’s expansive collection of self-portraits, Laughing Artist (Self Portrait) stands out for a number of reasons. As with Screaming Artist, the former lithograph presents a clear emotional contrast to most of his other self-portraits. The wide, uninterrupted white expanse of the laughing artist’s smile suggests the merriment conveyed by the title, while the fine dark lines around his eyes make them seem crinkled in the act of chuckling. In the background, the brilliant red and lilac inks convey a warm and positive mood. Compared to the more somber facial expressions and colors of self-portraits from various periods of his life, such as 1965’s Self Portrait at 28 and 1975’s Self Portrait with Dark Glasses, Laughing Artist (Self Portrait) is positively cheerful. The artist himself described his portrayal in this last work as “kind of a clumsy figure, not campy really, but it has a certain quality – I’m almost poking fun at myself” (qtd. in Adams 33-34).
The fact that the lithograph does contain an entire figure, however clumsy, is rare among Scholder’s works that depict himself. Although he often employed simple compositions dominated by whole bodies in his portraits of Native Americans, Laughing Artist (Self Portrait) and Self Portrait with Grey Cat from 2003 are perhaps his only two widely known full-length self-portraits. Body language in portraiture can communicate further layers of meaning, beyond facial expressions. In the case of Laughing Artist (Self Portrait), Scholder’s crossed arms, hands tucked away, seem to melt into his shirt. The bent vertical curve of the shirt’s placket suggests that the artist is relaxed and not standing completely upright. He therefore seems literally self-contained and at ease.
Depicting the full extent of his body also allows Scholder to demonstrate some of the lithographic techniques in which he excelled. Interestingly, he was hesitant to embrace this medium after finding it arduous during a college course (Adams 20). However, with the help of the print artisans of the Tamarind Institute, where Scholder was invited to work in 1970, he gained more comfort with the process. In Laughing Artist (Self Portrait), he employs liquid tusche (oil-based fluid to which ink adheres) to produce the mesmerizing, crumpled texture of his shirt and pants (Wasserberger 55). This technique results in small pools of high value surrounded by fine lines – a pattern almost like the organic polygons of malachite stone. By using this texture on both his shirt and pants, Scholder creates vertical continuity that gives his figure weight. Additionally, the black outline – thickest around his shoulders and lower legs – causes the figure to advance in the lithograph even more than the strong color contrast already makes possible. Thus, although the artist considered this work to be self-deprecating, he also communicates strength to viewers. Indeed, Laughing Artist (Self Portrait) might be seen as a visual counterpart to Scholder’s 1973 statement of confidence in his sense of self: “I believe I know exactly where I’m going (“On the Work” 112).
-K.V.
Sources
Adams, Clinton. Fritz Scholder: Lithographs. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975. Print.
Scholder, Fritz. “Introduction.” Fritz Scholder. By Joshua C. Taylor, William Peterson, R. Andrew Maass, and Rudy H. Turk. New York: Rizzoli, 1982. 7-31. Print.
Scholder, Fritz. “On the Work of a Contemporary American Indian Painter.” Leonardo 6.2 (1973): 109-112. Print.
Traugott, Joseph. “Native American Artists and the Postmodern Cultural Divide.” Art Journal 51.3 (1992): 36-43. Print.
Wasserberger, Leslie. “An American Expressionist.” In Lowery Stokes Sims, Truman T. Lowe, and Paul Chaat Smith. Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian. Munich: Prestel, 2008. 37-75. Print.
Biography
As a middle-aged man, the expressionist artist Fritz Scholder recalled his early love of drawing and painting: “There was never any question about what I would do” (Introduction 7). His roots as an artist began in the Midwest, where he was born in the small Minnesota town of Breckenridge in 1937. Due to his father’s job as a Bureau of Indian Affairs school administrator, his family moved to Pierre, South Dakota in 1950. There, he met Oscar Howe, a prominent Native American painter who served as his high school art teacher and an early artistic mentor (Sims 79). Scholder was himself part Native American, as his paternal grandmother was a member of the Luiseño tribe of California. However, the artist often noted that he was not raised on a reservation, or with a great deal of knowledge about his heritage. In 1996, he even stated, “I’m very proud of being one-quarter Native American [. . .] but on the other hand, I never gave it much thought” (qtd. in Smith 30).
Following his time in South Dakota, Scholder studied art at college in Wisconsin and California. In 1957, he met the painter Wayne Thiebaud, his teacher at Sacramento City College, who taught him about abstract expressionism and Pop Art (Scholder “On the Work” 110). Scholder subsequently moved to the Southwest, where he studied at the University of Arizona and held what he described as his “first and last job” as a painting and art history instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe (Introduction 10). At this residential arts school established by the United States government, he taught Native American students who would themselves go on to successful careers, including painters T.C. Cannon and Alfred Young Man (Wasserberger 41). Scholder resigned from his job in 1967 to protest administrative changes, but his three years of teaching there marked a significant turning point in his career (Scholder “On the Work” 110). It was during this time that he began to paint Native Americans after years of refusing to do so on the grounds that they had become a visual and psychological cliché (Hill 130). Instead, the artist decided that he could subvert the cliché through careful selection of content and techniques. He refused to depict Native Americans as noble savages and rejected the flat, decorative style that characterized much Native-themed art at the time, such as that produced for the tourist industry (Scholder “On the Work” 110). Remarkably, between 1967 and 1972, Scholder created over 300 paintings of Native Americans with striking images, brilliant colors, and expressive brushwork, including his particularly famous Super Indian No. 2 (Wasserberger 37). It depicts a traditionally dressed buffalo dancer whose rattle is replaced by a similarly shaped ice cream cone. Such works, which challenged and even laughed at stereotypical presentations of Native Americans, formed a basis for the New Indian Art Movement.
In 1970, Scholder extended this New Indian imagery into printmaking at the invitation of the Tamarind Institute, a fine-art lithography workshop in Albuquerque. The decade was also marked by his first solo exhibition, an artist residency at Dartmouth College, and two documentaries about his life and work (Sims, Lowe, and Smith 181). Apart from his New Indian paintings, Scholder explored a variety of subjects during the 1980s and 1990s. These included photographs of Native American stereotypes, obelisks inspired by ancient Egypt, and shadowy paintings of monsters (Sims, Lowe and Smith 181). His wide-ranging topics were matched by a similar breadth of genres and media, including not only prints and paintings, but also large bronze sculptures and artist’s books.
In the final decade of his life, Scholder was celebrated through numerous honorary degrees, frequent speaking engagements, and even a gallery dedication at the IAIA (Sims, Lowe, and Smith 181-183). He died in 2005 from complications of diabetes, but his work has continued to be widely exhibited and studied, including in a 2008 major retrospective at the National Museum of the American Indian.
-K.V.
Sources
Hill, Richard W., Sr. “The Institute of American Indian Arts and Contemporary Native Art.” In Lowery Stokes Sims, Truman T. Lowe, and Paul Chaat Smith. eds. Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian. Munich: Prestel, 2008. 121-149. Print.
Scholder, Fritz. “Introduction.” Fritz Scholder. By Joshua C. Taylor, William Peterson, R. Andrew Maass, and Rudy H. Turk. New York: Rizzoli, 1982. 7-31. Print.
Scholder, Fritz. “On the Work of a Contemporary American Indian Painter.” Leonardo 6.2 (1973): 109-112. Print.
Sims, Lowery Stokes. “Scholder’s Figuration: Art and Culture in American Art.” In Lowery Stokes Sims, Truman T. Lowe, and Paul Chaat Smith. eds. Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian. Munich: Prestel, 2008. 77-101. Print.
Sims, Lowery Stokes, Truman T. Lowe, and Paul Chaat Smith. eds. Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian. Munich: Prestel, 2008. Print.
Smith, Paul Chaat. “Monster Love.” In Lowery Stokes Sims, Truman T. Lowe, and Paul Chaat Smith. eds. Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian. Munich: Prestel, 2008. 25-35. Print.
Wasserberger, Leslie. “An American Expressionist.” In Lowery Stokes Sims, Truman T. Lowe, and Paul Chaat Smith. eds. Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian. Munich: Prestel, 2008. 37-75. Print.
