Post-War Native American Art and Late Modernism
This essay examines how a select group of Native American artists working in the post-war era through the 1980s engaged with and subverted the language of Modernism. Drawing on works by Allan Houser, Lee H. Marmon, Fritz Scholder, T.C. Cannon, and James Luna, the paper argues that these artists appropriated Euro-American aesthetic frameworks — from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and performance art — while simultaneously filtering them through their own Indigenous experiences. Far from passive adopters of a dominant tradition, these artists transformed Modernist conventions into tools of cultural assertion and political resistance, challenging the Western canon's historical exclusion of Native American voices.
- Introduction: Native American Art and the Modernist Tradition: Framing Native art's historical exclusion and subversive Modernist engagement
- Allan Houser and the Language of Abstract Sculpture: Houser's Comrade in Mourning and emergent abstract style
- Lee H. Marmon and the Photography of In-Between Worlds: Marmon's photograph capturing tradition and westernization in tension
- Fritz Scholder and the Interrogation of Euro-American Painting: Scholder's angry reappropriation of the noble savage stereotype
- T.C. Cannon, Pop Aesthetics, and Native Pride: Cannon's self-portrait blending Pop Art with Indigenous identity
- James Luna and the Performance of Living Artifact: Luna's Artifact Piece dismantling the dead Indian trope
- Conclusion: Subverting the Master Narrative: Assessing Native artists' challenge to the Western canon
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What makes this paper effective
- Each artist is introduced with a specific, well-described work, grounding abstract claims about identity and Modernism in concrete visual analysis.
- The essay builds a cumulative argument across five artists, moving from sculpture and photography through painting and performance, showing an escalating confrontation with dominant aesthetic norms.
- The paper consistently connects formal observations — style, composition, expression — to broader cultural and political contexts, demonstrating how form and content reinforce each other.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper exemplifies close visual analysis in service of a cultural argument. Rather than simply cataloguing artworks, the author reads specific formal choices (Scholder's deformed figures, Luna's open eyes, Cannon's blurred window/painting boundary) as carriers of ideological meaning. This technique — using ekphrasis to support a thesis about power and representation — is a model approach in art history writing.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a historiographical framing of Native American art's marginalization, then states its scope and time period. The five body sections each focus on one artist and one or two representative works, arranged roughly chronologically from 1949 to 1987. The conclusion steps back to assess the broader significance of these artists' engagement with Modernism. The figure list and bibliography follow standard art history conventions.
Introduction: Native American Art and the Modernist Tradition
To evaluate the impact that Native American art has had on the evolution of late Modernism — and vice versa — is not an easy task. It was only in the 1930s that art critics and historians began paying attention to Native American art and that it began to be exhibited in respectable galleries, and it was not until the 1960s that trained art historians began teaching Native American art in American universities. Yet, despite its historical slandering by the art historical canon, art has played a vital role in documenting the Native American experience.
While art inarguably has served different purposes for various Native American tribes over time, in the 20th century many Native artists working in a variety of mediums began to appropriate the language of Modernism — the "master narrative" of the colonizers — towards their own ends. This represented a particularly subversive move on the part of the artists, as Modernism was traditionally built on the heels of white European artists who looked towards the "exotic" other for inspiration (the most obvious example being Picasso's interest in African art).
This essay examines the work of a select group of Native American artists working in the post-war era who managed to adapt a Modernist language in their own work while simultaneously subverting that language by filtering it through their own personal experiences as Native artists. While some of the artists discussed here are still active, the focus is limited to the period immediately after World War II and up to the 1980s.
List of Figures
Fig. 1. Comrade in Mourning by Allan Houser (1949)
Fig. 2. White Man's Moccasins by Lee H. Marmon (1954)
Fig. 3. The End of the Trail by Fritz Scholder (1970)
Fig. 4. Self-Portrait in the Studio by T.C. Cannon (1975)
Fig. 5. Artifact Piece by James Luna (1987)
Bibliography
Rushing, W. Jackson III, ed. Native American Art in the Twentieth Century. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Wyckoff, Lydia L., ed. Visions and Voices. Tulsa, OK: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996.
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