DWELLERS AT THE SOURCE

Another Picasso? Fritz Scholder

Editor's Note: The Indian portrait, left, and others accompanying this article are from a collection of 17 untitled original oils distinguished as "The Dartmouth Portraits," done by Fritz Scholder during his tenure as artist-in-residence at Dartmouth University, Hanover, New Hampshire, during the fall of 1973. The series will be in exhibition at the Cordier-Ekstrom, Inc., gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, from January 8, through February 9. The Dartmouth Portraits indicate a feeling of respect for the strong and positive qualities of the Indian character, which we feel reflects the thinking of an artist whose works speak most eloquently of new found peace, understanding and security. After spending an afternoon with Fritz Scholder at his studio, on Cattle Track Road, Scottsdale, and listening to his plans for the future, we must agree with our friend James Bialac, one of the Southwest's most qualified collectors and appraisers of Indian art, who remarked, "Fritz Scholder will be another Picasso."

In the past few years Fritz Scholder has emerged as a major young American painter, not because he represents a particular tendency in art or because he has founded a new school of his own, but because of the vitality and personal intensity of his continuously surprising paintings and prints. In fact, a part of his appeal is his resistance to being typecast, his capacity for absorbing all that he needs from contemporary art sometimes quoting quite openly without losing himself in the formulas and theories that sometimes masquerade as artistic ends. Scholder's eye ranges freely beyond the modish peripheries of art.

Of course, as is always at once remarked, Scholder is of American Indian ancestry and is quite aware of the fact. The Indian has been his primary subject in recent years, and it might be speculated that this is the source of his power. But to be an "Indian artist" is not in itself a help to such forceful individual artistic statement. On the contrary, the artist must resist not only the stereotype of race, but the too-eager tendency to be praised for what he is not. Scholder has often protested that he is not an "Indian artist." He is an artist who is an Indian and draws strength from his Indian associations; there is a difference.

There have been many attempts over the years to make art a badge for new nationalisms and ethnic groups. As with adolescent painters in art school striving to devise their first independent works, the first efforts are invariably to establish a recognizable style. And once the stylistic symbol is identified with the cause, any major deviation is looked upon as a betrayal. The identification of the Indian with an art, as simplistic as our popular concept of the Indian himself, has been an inhibiting assumption for all concerned. While there persists a rich inheritance of ritualistic art among many Indian societies, it does not provide the language through which modern awareness can be shared. In fact, helped by wellmeaning anthropologists, an artificially preserved style has at times served to isolate the community, rendering its own traditions academic and closing the doors on that which might provide a tie between past vitality and the fragmenting complexity of modern society.

Art today is, perforce, international in language although, hopefully, personal and local in impulse. The will to be innocent of any artistic knowledge that lies beyond local limits can hardly serve now as a sound basis for creative thought, although it may be a useful means for constructing protective barriers to criticism. Art must have a broader base if it is to survive in any meaningful way. Yet the temptation is great to take refuge in a socially prepared niche.

Fritz Scholder grew up with no such limiting attitude towards painting. Although early associated with Indian communities and the accepted Indian traditions, and quite aware of his Indian descendence, he matured as an artist outside the limits of what had become codified as Indian art. The greatest impact on his thinking in his formative years came from the lively school of painters in the San Francisco area in the late 1950s. He studied with Wayne Thiebaud, and first exhibited there as a part of the group exploring new pictorial values. His delight from the beginning was in luminous color and the suave manipulation of paint, which might be translated into landscapes or figures or simply into a richly sensuous experience of color itself. He developed that evident enjoyment in the act of painting, of exploring rich provocative combinations of color and form, which still pervades his works. Certainly there was no aspect of contemporary art of which he was not aware, and he prodded as well into art of the past.

But something happened during the 1960s that gradually brought about a notable change in his work: without losing their breadth or freshness, the heretofore placid shapes took on the intensity and disconcerting aliveness of human images, entangling themselves in a totally different realm of the mind. The image was that of the Indian, familiar in aspect, but so little known in character. It is as if Scholder's consciousness and enjoyment of his own energies and vitality had expanded to embrace the members of a whole society, but a society marked by contradiction and paradox. The face of the Indian was hardly a new image to Scholder, but he was now prepared to view the situation of Indian life with a new sensitivity and awareness. And he had the means to state his new awareness in unambiguous form.

The transformation was a gradual response to the lively activity which then characterized the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where Scholder went to teach in the early 1960s. It was there that he began to expand the context of his richly colored canvases to include references to the Indian environment, both as a place and a state of mind. The outward, decorative aspect of traditional Indian art did not alter his own artistic direction, but he was attracted to the complex human situation of the modern Indian he saw around him, whose life seemed to be a curious compound of beauty, dignity and maddening absurdity. And yet there was a persistent, restless vitality that could not be denied.

Out of this awareness, both of himself and his fellows, came Scholder's best-known canvases, so attractive to the eye in their surprising colors and arresting compositions, but also so indelible to the mind in their provocative imagery. These are not commentaries on man in society or any other abstract theme, but sensitive evocations of states of being, inseparable from the often craggy protagonists they depict. Although his people are often engaged in elaborate activities, the action seems never to engross their whole attention. There is a detachment that seems to separate the inner character from the act in much the way the spectator is at the same time both directly involved and yet still a spectator.

Scholder has an uncanny ability to keep the observer in a position of uncertainty with regard to his works, as to both form and imagery. A winning lushness of color is likely to carry with it an underlying sense of strangeness or fear, and a monumental figure may be both powerfully impressive and, to a disarming degree, comic. A majestically clad Indian on horseback threatens to become a two-dimensional toy, yet still has a commanding presence; Scholder's "Super Indian #2" is an imposing, massive figure with his mysterious buffalo headdress, but delicately holds a double-dip strawberry ice cream cone.

What should we conclude from this unsettling procedure? Suspended in such a state of embarrassed uncertainty, our minds are vulnerable to thought, not the kind of thought that persists in drawing an ultimate message, but that more searching kind which prods one to rumination, and in our ruminations, we accept the contradictory co-existence of humor and mystery, dignity and pretense as an undeniable aspect of reality, in spite of the fact that such ambiguity may be contrary to our habits of synthesizing experience and pocketing the result in a complacently worded judgment. We continue to savor experience that is resistant to definition. This elusiveness is a major source of the persistent vitality of Scholder's works. He is no longer concerned with defining art. His study is to rediscover at each turn the densely disguised spark of human life.

This sounds rather pompous with regard to Scholder, because this leavening sense of the comic is inseparable from his candid view of people. With irreverent disruptiveness, Scholder's earthy humor is likely to surface in the most unexpected fashion, not to ridicule his subject, but to keep it in the realm of life. A recognizable cliché becomes suddenly a very human image, and yet the cliché is inescapable. For all this, Scholder can be passionately direct when he wants to; he has thus far happily avoided the snares of a style or formula.

On a recent trip to Europe, Scholder had the chance to visit Transylvania to explore to his satisfaction the haunts of Count Dracula. At once he was taken with the idea of the vampire, both repellent and fascinating, and a new series of paintings was begun. He has not, in other words, closed his mind to new images. He has only just begun.

As to the situation of the Indian, his social and political future, Scholder has little specific to say in his paintings. Fascinated by his subjects, he seems not to ask what they stand for, but only to comprehend their existence. At times he prods a nagging image as if it were an aching tooth, unwilling to suggest anything that might mitigate the pain. The ache is an inseparable part of the reality of the tooth. Although the image of the Indian has allowed him to define his human awareness, his theme is not limited to the concerns of any one social group. The Indians he portrays are both different from and like ourselves. Possibly this human bond, established within the complexity of our feelings, has more import than would obvious social advocacy.

On the recent exhibition in London of works by Scholder, an English critic was pleased to point out what he considered to be Scholder's debt to Francis Bacon, making much of his choosing an English model in preference to an American. Certainly Scholder admires the paintings of Bacon, but there is nothing in his work that repeats Bacon's claustrophobic hysteria and anguish over the conflict of soul and flesh. No matter the seeming hopelessness of their condition, Scholder's people have the vitality to prevail. In spite of subject matter that is sometimes grim and violent, or underscores human decay, there is a reassuring and evident enjoyment in Scholder's work that is not to be suppressed, evident in the very handling of his colors and paint, in his gleeful discovery of the unexpected paradox. And this expression of vital persistence is not a minor contribution to our often doctrinaire assessment of modern man.

Joshua C. Taylor Director, National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C.

The earth colors of Navajoland are reflected in the Blue Gem turquoise of this very rare Navajo necklace with hand wrought fluted tapered beads. Mrs. R. W. Mullen, private collection Monument Valley vista.