Nicole Smith
Specialist, Head of Sale
Lot 1
FRITZ SCHOLDER(1937-2005) LUISEÑO, 20TH CENTURYDancer 31 1/2 x 40 1/2 in. (80 x 102.9 cm.)
19 November 2025, 15:00 EST
New YorkUS$20,000 - US$30,000
Ask about this lot
FRITZ SCHOLDER (1937-2005), LUISEÑO, 20TH CENTURY
Dancer
signed 'Scholder' (upper right); inscribed and dated 'Dancer 1994' (on the reverse)
acrylic on paper
31 1/2 x 40 1/2 in. (80 x 102.9 cm.)
Executed in 1994
signed 'Scholder' (upper right); inscribed and dated 'Dancer 1994' (on the reverse)
acrylic on paper
31 1/2 x 40 1/2 in. (80 x 102.9 cm.)
Executed in 1994
Footnotes
Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937-2005) first began painting Indian subjects in 1967, three years after his appointment as a painting instructor at Santa Fe's Institute of American Indian Arts. A student of Wayne Thibaud during his time at the University of Arizona, Scholder's earlier works tended towards abstraction. The artist was initially vehemently resistant to the idea of "painting the Indian," and dismissed most works depicting Native subjects as romantic and cliché. He was also vocal about his distaste for the Studio Style of American Indian art (developed at the Santa Fe Indian School in the 1930s), which he considered far too limiting—both for those artists practicing it and those who chose not to adhere to its formalized standards. After some time in Santa Fe, Scholder changed tack, creating his first Indian-subject painting: Indian No. 1. This first work incorporated the bright palette which defined Scholder's work throughout his career, and depicted a Native man in Plains dress, his expression guarded, staring directly at the viewer. Scholder continued to create raw, visceral depictions of "real" Indians throughout the 70s and 80s, heavily influenced by the figurative work of Francis Bacon and his travels abroad. Scholder worked to re-frame depictions of Indigenous Americans, often referencing popular representations of Native figures whether from well-known early American or Western artists like George Catlin or James Earle Fraser, or the more contemporary "Matinee Indians" seen in Hollywood Westerns. His work also contextualized the contemporary Native experience, highlighting social issues facing Indigenous Americans and rejecting the idea of the Indigenous people of America as a "Vanishing Race," as posited by early 20th century photographer Edward Curtis.
In the 1980s, Scholder began experimenting more with different subject matters, with many resulting canvases inspired by his travels and incorporating more ephemeral themes like dreams, shamanism and mythology. Even so, the American Indian is a subject the artist returned to throughout the rest of his career. The present work, Dancer, is a later rendering by the artist dating to 1994. While executed more loosely than his earlier Indian paintings, Scholder's bold color choice is certainly carried through from his earlier works. As opposed to the direct challenge to the viewer presented by Indian No. 1, in Dancer, the subject faces away from the viewer, with the eye drawn naturally to the figure's elaborate feather bustle. The fancy dance, now practiced by a number of tribes across the US, was born out of the US Government's banning of traditional Native dance and religious practices in the late 19th century. The fancy dance is one of many dances created in the first half of the 20th century by tribes seeking new ways of preserving their culture without drawing governmental ire. While Dancer may not seem, on its face, to be one of Scholder's more directly evocative or challenging subjects, it certainly sits squarely within the context of the artist's life-long desire to paint the reality of the Indigenous American experience.