Katja Collects: Fritz Scholder

Summer is in full swing, bringing with it a season of bold creativity in the art world. As the days grow longer, so does the excitement surrounding remarkable sales and celebrated masterpieces. Our Katja Collects series this month honors Fritz Scholder’s Hollywood Indian #2 (1972). It’s a striking acrylic on canvas, a powerful work that continues Scholder’s legacy of challenging perceptions and redefining contemporary Native American art.

If you prefer to read a text version of the below graphic, keep scrolling, we’ve got you covered below!

What:

Fritz Scholder, Hollywood Indian #2, acrylic on canvas, 40” x 30”, 1972

Where:

Casterline/Goodman Gallery, Aspen, CO

Sold:

$375,000

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See It:

The American artist Fritz Scholder had lived in Scottsdale, Arizona for decades before passing away in the same city in 2005. I was therefore delighted to find Scholder paintings at the Pheonix Art Museum, and a few museum quality artworks for sale at the Scottsdale Ferrari Art Fair nearby. I was immediately intrigued by the thoughtfully curated section of important twentieth century Indigenous artists: John Nieto, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Scholder in the booth of Aspen, CO-based gallery Casterline/Goodman.

Hollywood Indian #2 looked especially relevant more than fifty years after its creation. Figuration has been a popular theme in painting for the past decade, and the strong composition and eerie color palette immediately caught my eye. This is not a clichéd depiction of “Indians” seen in Hollywood westerns, despite the title.

The isolated male figure with chalky skin delineated in both clear and hazy black contour stands on a mound of earth the color of red tomatoes. He is standing upright—victorious or defiant (I’m not sure)— with a grimaced expression as flat as the monochromatic teal background.

As such, this five-decade-old painting is relevant to contemporary painting trends exploring identity, while also offering an American counterpart to the anguished figures often seen in British painter Francis Bacon’s art from the 1970s. Scholder is a painter first and foremost, as color and composition are the primary definitions of his subject matter. Hollywood Indian #2 makes a social commentary while being a powerful work of art.

Collect it:

Contemporary Indigenous artists have been in the spotlight recently— from Jeffrey Gibson representing the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s 2023 retrospective at the Whitney, and George Morrison’s art being on US Postal Stamps in 2022. Not surprisingly, there is now more market and collector interest in the prior generation that led the way both aesthetically and thematically. Fritz Scholder was born in Minnesota in 1937 and was interested in art beginning in his childhood. He eventually studied with Wayne Thiebaud in Sacramento and received an MFA from The University of Arizona.

Scholder seems to have felt the ambiguity and paradoxes felt by many Indigenous people of his generation in the second half of the twentieth century. In his youth he traveled with his father, who was a school administrator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In contrast to seeing the daily lives of Native peoples, Scholder would have also been exposed to images of— usually stereotyped—Native Americans in cinema. Although he was an enrolled member of the Luiseño tribe (maternal lineage through his grandmother), Scholder often claimed he was not a Native American.

In the late 1960’s, while teaching art at the newly formed Institute of American Indian Art in Sante Fe, New Mexico, the artist experienced a personal and creative breakthrough. Until then, Scholder had resolutely refused to paint a Native American figure, but he became so frustrated by his students’ inability to depict a Native person during a painting session in 1967 that he created one himself, thus starting his own visual journey of wrestling with his heritage and Native people’s history.

The current record price for a Scholder painting is half a million dollars for his 1973 painting Hollywood Indian and Horse #2, which greatly exceeded its presale estimate of $50,000 – $70,000. That sale occurred in 2022, and ever since, important works, like Hollywood Indian #2 sell in the strong six digits. The 1967 painting Four Indian Riders came close to half a million dollars at Hindman in their spring 2025 auction.

Care for it:

Paintings of oil on canvas age well in the appropriate humidity and temperature environments. Collectors may consider framing the item in glass for the best protection. Be sure to schedule the item on your art insurance policy. As Scholder currently has a strong market, it is advisable to check in with the gallery on an annual basis to see if there are changes in the value of the artwork.

Photos: Photo Source: https://www.casterlinegoodman.com/

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