MMK Frankfurt Hosts First Major Retrospective of Fritz Scholder

In Frankfurt am Main, a first major retrospective of the US painter Fritz Scholder, who died in 2005, is on display. On show is plenty of flat art – in the best sense.

28 July 2026 | 13:41 Uhr

Credit: Axel Schneider

By Katharina J. Cichosch

A feather on the head, two long braids, a magnificent necklace – and in case anyone still doubts who they are seeing, the painter has painted the clue directly into the picture: "INDIAN" is written at the top right of the image, on orange-brown two-dimensionality, the background as flat as the prototypical protagonist.

Like a greeting from the approaching 1980s postmodernism, Fritz Scholder's "Indian No. 1," painted in 1967, appears. It is just another testament to the exceptional status of the US painter, who can now be discovered for the first time in a major retrospective at the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art. In the major museums of New Mexico, Arizona, or Colorado, numerous works can be found, just as in private collections – Andy Warhol also bought Scholder in his time.

Fritz Scholder, born in 1937 in Breckenridge, Minnesota, had sworn never to paint so-called Indians. His name did not reveal his indigenous family. But as a painter, you do not always choose your subjects; some find you or seek you out secretly. The external images of the noble savages haunted Scholder, and so in 1967 he painted his titular first "Indian," followed by countless others.

Exhibition details:

• Fritz Scholder
• MMK – Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main
• Until October 25

It would be simplistic to say that Scholder painted against those cliché images that were made in the USA (and, as the show reveals, hardly less in Europe) of the so-called Indian and which the painter also saw reproduced in the cementing of so-called Native Art. His practice, however, seems much more like a painting with the clichés – whose figures, especially faces, he dissolves into color gestures in the manner of a Francis Bacon, here completely abstracted, there looking out from the picture as unflattering grotesques or humorously unfolded grimaces.

Loose kinship in an idiosyncratic work

The reference to Pop Art is also obvious, yet his painting never fully dissolves into its flatness, as many references in Scholder are rather loose kinship within a quite idiosyncratic oeuvre. Often it remains an in-between, an acting within the painterly, which the artist Scholder resolves one way or another. Everything there is to say is already in these pictures.

Scholder prefers to deny his protagonists the American horizon, which, although shaped in film and television, has a real counterpart. Instead of riding into the Western sunset, they ride straight into blue or brown or pink monochrome – a horizon made of bubblegum.

Fritz Scholder's Indians, Indigenous, Native Americans are often out of focus, just as focus requires a subject and an object that the painter deliberately mixes up. Sometimes the colors are washed out like a poster that has hung in the rain too long; the protagonists are eternal projection screens. There are different levels of truth in these pictures; Fritz Scholder does not commit himself. He lets his protagonists ride into the aforementioned monochrome. Or they ride motorcycles, wait at the bus stop, carry umbrellas. Some are drinkers or simply tired (the picture "Tired Indian" is magnificent).

Credit: Axel Schneider

Alongside paintings, the show presents a series of lithographs in which Fritz Scholder showed, in his time, whom hardly anyone had painted before – the once exoticized as completely ordinary people. With this, he aimed not only against external projections but also against internalized expectations.