Fritz Scholder valuation
Painted Indians with beer cans and umbrellas, and was attacked from every direction for it.
Fritz Scholder was born in Minnesota in 1937, one-quarter Luiseno and enrolled in the tribe, and taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe having sworn he would never paint Indians.
What a work by Fritz Scholder is worth
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Bio
Fritz Scholder was born in Minnesota in 1937, one-quarter Luiseno and enrolled in the tribe, and taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe having sworn he would never paint Indians. He broke that promise in 1967 and produced the series that changed the field: Native subjects painted in the manner of Bacon and Wayne Thiebaud, wearing sunglasses, holding ice creams and beer cans, wrapped in the American flag — attacked by traditionalists for degrading the subject and by others for exploiting it, and now understood as the moment contemporary Native American painting began. He died in 2005.
An American market centred on the Southwest, with strong institutional interest. The Indian series of 1967 to 1980 leads by a wide margin over the later work, which is a broad field. Scholder was also a very prolific printmaker in lithography, working with Tamarind and others across three decades in editions typically of fifty to two hundred, and those prints are plentiful and are what most owners hold. The paintings use thin acrylic and oil on canvas with matt passages that mark easily. The Scholder estate holds the archive.
Oscar Howe, Thiebaud and Indians Forever
At school in Pierre, South Dakota, Scholder was taught by the Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe, and in Sacramento from 1957 he studied with Wayne Thiebaud, who invited him to help found a cooperative gallery. A John Hay Whitney Fellowship took him to graduate study at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
In 1970 the Tamarind Institute, newly moved to Albuquerque, invited him to make its first major project there, the suite of seven lithographs Indians Forever. The National Museum of the American Indian opened a two-venue retrospective, Indian/Not Indian, in Washington and New York in 2008, and the Denver Art Museum's Super Indian: Fritz Scholder, 1967–1980 opened in 2015.
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