August 12, 2001

By JOSHUA BROCKMAN

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. — Inside an adobe-walled oasis of palm trees and oleander, Fritz Scholder lives amid skulls and skeletons. In the garden, several of Mr. Scholder’s sculptures feature skull-like heads. In the library, an 18th-century skull engraved with witchcraft symbols shares shelf space with books printed before 1500. Even the porch has been converted into a skull room, complete with a macabre place setting surrounded by Mexican Day of the Dead paraphernalia that spill from cabinets and rest on shelves and antique chairs.

Like much of the art created by Mr. Scholder, these skulls and skeletons exude an air of mystery. Their presence inside his home and studio is one of the many paradoxes the artist celebrates in his work across several mediums.

In the studio, where a springtime visitor found the artist preparing for the show of new work that will be at the Chiaroscuro gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., until the end of this month, Mr. Scholder was working on “Not Alone No. 5,” a 7-by-16-foot stretched canvas from which more than 160 skulls stare at the viewer from a black horizon. “When it is finished,” Mr. Scholder said, “each skull will be individual. You will be able to see the personality of each skull.”

“Alone No. 5,” its complement, features a single cranium floating at eye level on a large black canvas of the same dimensions. The two skull paintings, designed to face each other, form the most monumental work in the latest of Mr. Scholder’s series, “Alone/Not Alone.” A colorful and vibrant meditation on mortality, isolation and relationship, “Alone/Not Alone” combines two longstanding themes in Mr. Scholder’s career: his rendering of iconic and dyadic figures and his depiction of skulls and skeletons.

“I consider myself a natural optimist,” he said, “which might be surprising, because I like the dark side of things. That’s simply because of intellectual curiosity. I celebrate each day. I truly wake up happy every morning.”

“Alone, No. 2,” part of a vibrant series on mortality, isolation and relationship by Fritz Scholder. Mark Henrickson

There was indeed nothing dark in the demeanor of this portly 63-year-old artist with shoulder-length hair and a radiant smile, which suffuses his face and masks his shyness. When he leaves his solitary compound, he does so with a combination of panache and privacy, driving a gold 1979 Rolls-Royce fitted with tinted windows.

Born in Breckenridge, Minn., the fifth Fritz in a family primarily of German ancestry, he grew up with a passion for collecting, which has informed his largely autobiographical art. Although his career has included etchings, aquatints, lithographs, monotypes, photographs, collages, sculpture and mixed media, he is best known for his paintings.

A finished work is only one stage of Mr. Scholder’s artistic journey. Before he begins a series, he delves into the subject matter, researching, reading, preparing. “It is the concept and the approach that is of value,” he said. “With every painting, you learn. You have to keep open, and it’s not easy walking the tightrope between discipline and accident.”

With a beachcomber’s eye for the esoteric, he has amassed a living museum of artifacts that he uses as props or springboards for his series, which can be as memorable for their titles as for their subjects: “Mystery Woman,” “Monster Love,” “Shaman,” “Conjuror,” “Martyr.”

His dining room, a cabinet of curiosities, is packed with collections that include a two-headed calf, a shrunken human head from Borneo and a vial filled with powdered mummy, a medieval remedy. Mr. Scholder’s library evokes his paintings: the Egyptian sarcophagus, the mounted buffalo head and the wall of masks (surrounding a pair of portraits of the artist by Warhol) have all turned up in his canvases.

The sarcophagus, as well as mummies of a child, a falcon, a puppy and a cat, are part of an extensive accumulation of Egyptian treasures. “Egypt is for me the most fascinating and important culture,” Mr. Scholder said. “I like the fact that they made animals gods, whereas in our culture, we tend to be mean to animals.” His affinity for animals is reflected in the zoo of taxidermic creatures scattered throughout his home, with a special emphasis on the buffalo: “I believe that every human should have a twin animal spirit, and the buffalo is mine,” Mr. Scholder said, pointing out a complete specimen standing behind his bed. In 1975 he even fashioned a self-portrait called “Buffalo Artist.”

Animal and human forms are also commingled in the “Alone/Not Alone” series. Its painted figures, like many of Mr. Scholder’s sculptures, are asymmetrical, with one or no arms, one eye, or a combination of human and animal limbs. In “Alone No. 2,” a creature set against an explosive red and violet horizon has one arm, one human foot, one cloven foot and rudimentary horns protruding from a partially masked head.

“It’s not necessarily the Devil,” Mr. Scholder explained. “It could be a clone. It’s of course another portrait of me. Most of the figures are. I paint myself in many guises. It’s all unconscious. I don’t think about it until years later.”

The “Not Alone” paintings focus on the interplay between a male figure and a female. “Almost every painting worthwhile has secrets, as far as I’m concerned,” Mr. Scholder said while showing a visitor “Not Alone No. 2,” an encounter between a woman and a dark shadow figure covered with burnt-orange spots.

“Alone/Not Alone,” which opened on Aug. 1, comes at an introspective time for Mr. Scholder. Nazraeli Press has just published a retrospective book, “Fritz Scholder: Paintings,” which includes an example of nearly every series he has produced since 1960. “Last Portraits,” an exhibition focusing on his substantial array of skull and skeleton art, will open in October at the Tweed Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota in Duluth.

This Wednesday in Santa Fe, the Institute of American Indian Arts will dedicate a museum gallery in Mr. Scholder’s honor. It was while teaching painting at the institute, in 1967, that he began the controversial “Indian” series that propelled his career. Although one of his grandmothers was a Native American from the Luiseño tribe in California, Mr. Scholder said, he grew up “a non-Indian.” Still, his innovative approach, based on observation and historical research, repudiated traditional, sentimentalized renderings of mythic Indians. “I have painted the Indian real, not red,” he wrote in 1972 of his work from this era. Mr. Scholder said he was the first artist to paint an Indian wrapped in an American flag, a motif that has found its way into Native American imagery. He said he had based the image on 19th-century prison photographs of Indians dressed in surplus flags in lieu of their confiscated tribal regalia. “I was very aware of the irony that had never been depicted,” he recalled.

His numerous series on Native American themes, created between 1967 and the 1990’s, still resonate. In an essay for “Fritz Scholder: Paintings,” Frank H. Goodyear Jr., the director of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, wrote of these works: “Scholder has achieved this sense of turning the pages of Indian history and, at the same time, has made some of his most strikingly contemporary images.” Indeed, the covers of Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, “The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse,” and new editions of her previous books feature paintings from Mr. Scholder’s “Indian” series.

Mr. Scholder’s favorite subject, however, is women. In “Thoughts at Night,” a self- published book coupling his art and prose, Mr. Scholder wrote: “Love and passion make up the creative energy for the artist.” And women are a constant presence throughout his many series. Paul Karlstrom, the West Coast regional director for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, wrote in the retrospective book: “For him, they embody and encompass all of human experience, from birth through love to death.”

For his “Mystery Woman” series, Mr. Scholder found inspiration in his own backyard, placing female models in his pool and painting them in images that recalled David Hockney’s. The dreamlike floating figures of Chagall found analogues in the levitating bodies prominent in Mr. Scholder’s “Millennium” series. Mr. Scholder’s paintings “Floating Red Shoe” and “Floating Brushes” celebrated mundane objects with a sensibility akin to that of Wayne Thiebaud, a mentor with whom Mr. Scholder studied at Sacramento City College in 1957. Mr. Scholder’s style also reveals the influence of Francis Bacon, Goya, Gauguin and Edvard Munch.

In his essay, Mr. Goodyear compared Mr. Scholder’s work to that of many American painters of his generation. “Scholder’s art lies between two counter-aesthetics ÷ the dynamic bravado of Abstract Expressionism and the hard realism of Pop Art,” Mr. Goodyear wrote. Others have called his style symbolist or colorist. But Mr. Scholder describes his art as “American expressionist.”

“An expressionist is one who celebrates paint,” he said. “Paint drips, it smears. It’s not because I’m trying to fool anyone into thinking this is a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface,” Mr. Scholder said, gesturing toward the skulls on the black canvas in his studio.

For him, painting is both a magical and sensual encounter that brings together the tensile, responsive canvas; the soft, flexible brushes and the wet, buttery paint. “It’s a turn-on,” he said. “But it’s also terribly serious, because it is in a way one of the universal rituals of making a mark on something that will last longer than you.”

Mr. Scholder’s dedication to his artistic afterlife has led him to design his own posters, postcards, catalogs and books. “Documentation is very important because it lasts longer than any show,” he said. What’s more, he maintains a sizable collection of his own work, typically holding on to favorites from his series. But, he said, “my most favorite painting is the one I’m going to do next.”

Joshua Brockman’s most recent article for Arts & Leisure was about the exhibition “Jewish Pioneers of New Mexico.”

Read original article, which appeared in Arts & Lesiure, Section 2, on pgs. 31, 36.

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