The Halogens (Primary Title)
Steve Wheeler, American, born Slovakia, 1912 - 1992 (Artist)
Against the turbulent backdrop of global war, many American painters and sculptors turned to increasingly abstract forms to express subjective, even subconscious, experiences. Like European modernists of previous decades, some looked for purity and truth in the “primitive” art of African, Oceanic, and Native American cultures. Steve Wheeler and a small cadre of artists known as “Indian Space Painters” found inspiration in the determined flatness, meandering lines, and all-over compositions of Northwest Coast Indian art – examples of which were on view at New York’s Museum of the American Indian and at the Indian Art of the United States exhibition mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in 1941. These formal conventions are in evidence in Wheeler’s The Halogens, painted the following year. His fractured space, invented creatures, and biomorphic forms also reveal the significant influences of cubism and surrealism.
In the late 1940s, Wheeler’s contemporary and fellow admirer of Native American art, Jackson Pollock, would join other painters of the so-called New York school in forging a new, mostly nonrepresentational approach. Artworks by leading abstract expressionists, as that group is known, are on view in the museum’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Modern and Contemporary Galleries.
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