An Artist’s Identify Theft
Painter Denied Indian Ties, Yet Work Revealed Connection
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 9, 2008; Page C01
It would be easier to believe that Fritz Scholder was conflicted about his identity — was he a Native American artist, or an artist who happened to be one-quarter Native American? — if he hadn’t been quoted as saying, “Fine art is still the best racket around.”
That line appears in a short film accompanying a show of Scholder’s work at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. It’s to the museum’s credit that the curators are so upfront about the controversy that dogged Scholder’s career, his lifelong insistence that he wasn’t really an Indian, even as he grew rich and famous painting garish and confrontational images of Indians. It’s hard not to walk through this exhibition and smell more than a whiff of fraud going on.
It was a complicated fraud, though, maybe so complicated that the fraud itself approaches the level of art.
Scholder, who died three years ago, was born in 1937, in Minnesota, to a father who was half-Indian and worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.