Additional Information
Provenance:
Larsen Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ
Like Fritz Scholder and Allan Houser before him, John Nieto took great pride in his abilities as an American artist, not just a Native American artist. His work—modern and abstract with huge panes of pure color fragmented around figures—was on the cutting edge of contemporary art, more comparable to Andy Warhol and Henri Matisse than any Western artist. Traditional Dancer, a reflection of his modernist approach to the figure, shows huge fields of blue surrounding the performer clad in regalia that includes silver medallions, armbands and a plume of feathers. Although the paint is applied in big blocks of color, detail is not lost, particularly in the face as the man’s profile cuts a magnificent silhouette against the deep blues of the background.