Western & Contemporary Native American Art

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Sotheby's, Modern & Contemporary Paintings, Watercolours & Sculpture, New York, New York, October 12, 1991, Lot 360

One of the most important American artists of the latter half of the 20th century, Fritz Scholder, who was one-quarter Luiseño, held his Native heritage as well as the realities of contemporary Native American life up to the light of art. He twisted, distorted, and painted what he knew and saw of the difficulties of contemporary Native American life in its struggle to reconcile modernity with tradition. Scholder was born in Minnesota and studied with Oscar Howe. When his family moved to California, he continued his studies with Wayne Thiebaud. Painted in 1969, the year Scholder resigned from a teaching post at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and decided to travel to Europe and North Africa, Indian at Bar is one of the artist’s paintings of  what he called “real Indians” that challenge assumptions. Indian at Bar comes across as both a condemnation of forced assimilation and as a satire on the Hollywood Western. The figure’s tipped hat, easy left hand hanging down, the lean against the bar with the knee partly bent, the beer at arm’s length, even the suggestion of a window at upper left, a vantage point, to see who’s coming in—with a different face, this could be Clint Eastwood pretending to be nonchalant while waiting for some foe. But, of course, it isn’t Eastwood, and that’s the point. Instead, it’s a re-appropriation of one of the visual tropes of the Western, a displacement of the cowboy-gunman by a Native American. “Is this what you want us to be?” Scholder’s painting seems to ask.

-James D. Balestrieri