IndianSpace

Steve Wheeler and Burgoyne Diller

Indian Space Painters

Visitors to the Long Island home of Henry Luce III in the 1990s would have seen prominently displayed in the living room a magnificent oil painting from the 1940s by Steve Wheeler. The arts patron and scion of the Time Inc. publishing empire could easily have afforded a multi-million-dollar canvas by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning or Mark Rothko, but instead he opted for the virtually unknown Wheeler to occupy this choice wall space. Even today, many—if not most—scholars of American art have never heard of Wheeler, who is the leading figure in a group of artists known as the Indian Space Painters.

Who were these forgotten artists? The exotic, intriguing name they gave themselves would suggest they were Indians working out in the wide-open spaces of the West, but ironically, they were city slickers—New Yorkers, mostly by adoption. The first generation of Indian Space Painters, Wheeler, Peter Busa and Robert Barrell, met as students at the Art Students League in the late 1930s and then studied with the legendary European Modernist Hans Hofmann, who had abandoned his famous Munich school after the rise of Hitler and re-established himself in New York, on 8th Street in Greenwich Village. Hofmann combined Picasso’s fractured Cubist space with Matisse’s abstract use of color. Another influence on Wheeler, Busa and Barrell was Surrealism, a style that dominated the 1930s and investigated the unseen realities of the mind, the unconscious psychological forces and primitive urges that drive all humans. In 1936, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a landmark exhibition on Dada and Surrealism, which had an untold impact on the then-small New York art world. The show triggered an interest in tribal cultures, which the artists perceived as being closer to nature, and thus to basic human instincts and elemental truths, than advanced civilization.

The Indian Space Painters were especially attracted to American Indian culture. They were regular visitors to the ethnographic dioramas and exhibits at the Museum of National History, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of the American Indian (then called the Heye Foundation). In particular they were drawn to the objects of the Northwest Coast Indians, admiring the way the Indian artists reduced nature to flat, linear symbols and created images in which it was nearly impossible to distinguish positive from negative space. To them, these 18th- and 19th-century artifacts anticipated 20th-century modernism. More importantly, the Space Painters perceived these abstract images as embodying elemental truths.

Wheeler is generally recognized as the group’s leader and was among the first of them to embrace Indian aesthetics, as can be seen in works such as “The Clarinet Player,” 1945–50, and “Laughing Boy Rolling,” 1946. These brightly colored paintings, reflecting Hofmann’s palette of intense primary and secondary hues, are filled with Indian abstractions of masks, animals, eyes and such elemental forces as the sun, moon, sky and water. These works contain traces of the abstract patterning of Pablo Picasso—the dominant figure in 1930s art world and the one that every artist tried to match and better—and Joan Miró. Another influence was the nonobjective work of the American Abstract Artists, especially Burgoyne Diller, Charles Shaw and George L.K. Morris, members of a group formed in 1936 for the purpose of carrying the banner of Modernism and abstract art against the onslaught of representational Social Realism and American Scene Painting, which the social concerns of the Depression seemed to favor. While not members of the American Abstract Artists, Wheeler and his companions were similarly dedicated to the cause of abstraction. It is revealing, however, that Wheeler’s Indian-inspired, tightly interlocking forms and very busy, complicated compositions are more two-dimensional and airless than anything produced by their artistic predecessors. We could never mistake a Wheeler for a Picasso, Diller or Stuart Davis, to mention another great American 1930s abstract painter.


While attracted to the same sources, Wheeler’s colleagues developed distinct styles. Barrell’s paintings are compositionally similar to Wheeler’s in their interlocking forms, but their palette is different. Busa’s paintings, such as “The Thing in the Present,” 1946, are more painterly and less hard-edged, and reflect his close relationship with the Parisian Surrealist Roberto Matta, who settled in New York at the outbreak of war. Busa met weekly with Matta, Pollock, William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell to make Surrealist automatic drawings, and the wild, wiry, curving lines and patterning in his paintings reflect the rapid, unconscious movement of the arm and hand that within two years would lead Pollock to create his first drip paintings. By 1943, Howard Daum, who was responsible for coining the term “Indian Space Painters,” joined the group, and like Wheeler, he worked with a mosaic of emblematic shapes—although, as can be seen in his “Untitled (#264),” circa 1946, his early work was influenced by and had a playfulness reminiscent of Paul Klee and a Miró-like black line.

In the spring of 1946, one year before Pollock’s landmark exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, the group held its first and only exhibition, “Semeiology or 8 and a Totem Pole,” at Gallery Neuf on East 79th Street. By then they had been joined by Gertrude Barrer and Ruth Lewin, the former wielding a darker palette than her colleagues, the latter a consummate printmaker whose style had a jagged, abrupt, piercing quality often found in wood- and linoleum cuts. Before the year was out, the Space Painters also included Helen DeMott, whose 1946 painting “The Beach” was illustrated in the group’s magazine, Iconograph, first published in conjunction with the show and dedicated to demonstrating how Native American art could serve as a foundation for contemporary American art.

It is telling that Wheeler refused to participate in the Gallery Neuf show. He disliked being pigeonholed as an artist whose paintings were based on Indian art, for he felt that his work was much richer and drew upon a broad range of sources. Wheeler’s pictures are about the metaphysical properties of contemporary life. His titles, such as “Peg Taking a Drag” and “Woman Eating a Hot Dog,” reflect his focus on mundane activities, which he then puts into a cosmic, timeless context.

Will Barnet, today a noted representational artist and illustrator, joined the group in the late 1940s and likewise aspired to depict the play of the eternal, universal forces in contemporary life. He saw a parallel between what he called the “the dynamism of Indian society” and the fast-paced tempo of the modern world, and he found the abstract vocabulary of Native American art perfect “for interpreting their emotions” that connected them to the mystical world of the raw American landscape and served as an example for today’s artists.

Like the Abstract Expressionists, the Indian Space Painters were preoccupied with creating a distinctly American art, one that shed the chains of European culture to express indigenous experiences. But Abstract Expressionism, which emerged in 1947 with Pollock’s first exhibition of drip paintings and de Kooning’s first one-man show, struck the death knell for the Space Painters, who despite briefly gaining the attention of the great Modernist art critic Clement Greenberg, fell into oblivion by the 1950s. They disappeared almost as soon as they emerged.

It was not until the early 1990s that the Indian Space Painters were rediscovered. Barbara Hollister, a New York painter who also worked as a consultant to artists’ estates, was told to go look at the estate of Daum, whose works had not been exhibited since the 1960s. “I hadn’t seen this work before, and I found it quite interesting,” Hollister says. Research, especially a 1983 Arts Magazine article on the Space Painters by Ann Gibson, soon led her to Wheeler. She recognized the group as “the missing link” to Abstract Expressionism, realizing they played a significant role in creating the artistic environment of abstraction and flat, all-over imagery that help spawn Ab Ex. She was especially intrigued by the artists’ “involvement with their immediate world and the daily life that was their subject matter.” Also, she noted how Wheeler, who was still alive at the time, “talked about how he was interested in the concept of totality—how all of the objects from the smallest to the largest were part of an epic vision. A ‘minute graph of the universe’ was Wheeler’s term.”

To promote these artists Hollister contacted Sandra Kraskin, the director of the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College in New York. As fate would have it, Kraskin was one of the few people in New York who had heard of the Indian Space Painters, for she had studied painting with Busa at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s. She even proposed writing her Ph.D. dissertation on the group, but the faculty rejected her topic, deeming it minor and insignificant. In 1991 Hollister and Kraskin organized for the Mishkin Gallery “The Indian Space Painters, Native American Sources for American Abstract Art,” the first exhibition of the group since 1946.

In her search to find representation for the artists, Hollister approached New York art dealer Gary Snyder. Snyder decided to represent Daum and Wheeler, who died just after the exhibition closed. Eventually, he handled most of the Space Painters. It was a perfect match as Snyder was a passionate and eloquent advocate for the group. He put them into a rich historical context, for he showed them with Native American art and such Abstract Expressionists as Adolph Gottlieb, who similarly incorporated tribal pictographs and ideographs into his work.

One person who saw the shows at Gary Snyder Fine Art was Gail Stavitsky, chief curator at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, an institution that, in addition to having outstanding holdings in American modernism, also had an outstanding collection of Native American art. “I became interested because this work was of such high quality, and it bridges our two primary collections. It’s an important forgotten chapter in American art.” She was also attracted to the group’s quest to create a distinctly American art: “One thing that struck me was something Will Barnet said—the need to go beyond Cubism and find an authentic native American voice.” In addition to acquiring works by Wheeler, Barrell and Daum, Stavitsky mounted in 1997 the first museum exhibition devoted to Wheeler. At this point, due to the Montclair show, Henry Luce, who often bought against the popular tide, acquired his Wheeler painting. Despite Snyder’s valiant efforts though, the group never took off with collectors.

Today, with prices for quality modern art reaching well into the seven and eight figures, the Indian Space Painters have yet to crack the six-figure threshold. Their watercolors and gouaches can be purchased for under $10,000, making them ideal for young collectors.

Today, David Findlay Jr. Fine Art in New York handles most of the estates of the Space Painters, although their works from the 1940s are becoming scarce. Gallery director Louis Newman says, “The issue for me is their significance individually and collectively to the story of American art, and it’s a story that is not told often enough. They were the conduit leading into Abstract Expressionism. They were very interested in flattening out the picture plane and in all-over painting. But they didn’t abandon the figure, as did the Abstract Expressionists, so they were overshadowed. I see my job as bringing attention to these artists who have made what I feel are important contributions to our culture.”

Art & Antiques Contributing Editor Joseph Jacobs is executive director of the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation in New York.2.2007