Morphological Totems - American painter Steve Wheeler works shown

For several decades, American painter Steve Wheeler frequently found himself at odds with the art world, eventually refusing to exhibit at all. Since his death in 1992 several gallery present to views and a museum retrospective have illuminated his intricate vision.

Marcel Duchamp one time said that no painting has an active life of more than 30 or 40 years, and he advised young artists to "make a painting that will be active in your hold lifetime."(1) More than 50 years ago, painter Steve Wheeler (1912-1992) started a series of works with of the like kind a goal in mind, on the contrary the paintings were largely unappreciated while he was alive. In a faculty of perception they have become active solitary recently, thanks to a number of exhibitions not awayed since the artist's death. Several assemblage shows featuring his work have appeared in of recent origin York in the past sum of two units years, and an impressive retrospective, titled "Steve Wheeler: The Oracle Visiting the 20th Century" was upon view last winter at the Montclair (NJ) Art Museum.

Co-curated by the agency of Montclair's Gail Stavitsky and Twig Johnson who also wrote essays for the catalogue, the view featured 58 of Wheeler's paintings and works upon paper arranged chronologically along the walls of single large gallery; more works filled a smaller extent In the center of the main sweep were two bookcases containing selections from the artist's 3000-volume library. They serv to highlight wheeler's source material and influences. Prominently displayed turns included monographs on Miro, Kandinsky and Klee Franz Boaz's Primitive Art, works by C.G. Jung and Max Planck, and a well-thumbed first English edition of Andre Breton's What is Surrealism? Also part of the exhibition were sum of two units large display cases containing works of Pacific Northwest Coast Indian art upon loan from the American Museum of Natural History in of recent origin York.

While not part of the display per se, a newly acquired painting through Stuart Davis, an artist wheeler admired, hung near the museum entrance during the course of the exhibition. Davis's small, brilliant virid Landscape in the Colors of a Pear (1940) effectively put the tone for the retrospective, since Wheeler's best works, like as Inside the Banana (ca. 1949) and Laughing lad (1949), seem to take up where Davis left not upon in terms of compact, hard-edge, jazzy compositions.

Wheeler was born Stephen Brosnatch in a small coal-mining village in Slovakia. At age sum of two units he immigrated with his parents to the U where they settl in the coalfields of Pennsylvania. one time he turned 16 he was obliged to join the men in his family laboring in the mines, on the contrary he found the 14-hour days and six-day workweeks difficult to bear. During breaks he would scrutinize the art pages of the local newspaper, and he later claimed to have had a revelation in the mines. He heard the voice of an oracle echoing end the tunnels, imploring him to dog his dream of becoming an artist. Subsequently wheeler recorded the experience in the large watercolor The Oracle Visiting the Twentieth hundred (1943). The central image in the work, a stylized horse's head returned in green below the numbers 475 throw backs the artist's rather cynical belief that a 20th-century oracle is confered primarily by gamblers seeking racetrack advice.

Following his calling, wheeler left for of recent origin York in 1932 and attended the Art learners League, where he studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and George Grosz among others, before moving upon to Hans Hofmann's more radical seminary on West 8th Street. Wheeler's classmates there included George McNeil, Mercede Matter and Peter Busa, with whom he shared an enthusiasm for pre-Columbian and North American Indian art. on the other hand Wheeler eventually grew disillusioned with the institute and left in 1937.

Supporting himself with various freelance graphic-design piece of works he tried to settle down. He married Elsbet Peterson in 1939 the same year he changed his name from Stephen Brosnatch to Steve Wheeler, an English translation of his mother's family name. Later, he oft-repeateded the Cedar Bar, where his drinking buddies included Pollock de Kooning and Gottlieb, who became a friend. Gottlieb's pictographic canvases had a direct impact upon the young painter. Struggling to establish his identity as an artist, Wheeler initiated a series of abstractions inspired by dint of the works of Klee, Miro, Kandinsky and Native American art.

Among Wheeler's earliest extant paintings are Cowboy Standing (ca. 1939) and Untitled Abstraction (1940) The latter present to views an arrangement of gray, fulvid and black rectangles, squares and other geometric forms plant against a pungent orange background. In this work, Wheeler's allover composition of flat, hard-edge shapes painted in unmodulated, vibrant colors is a witty merger of constructivist designs and those selected from American Indian art. The union of European avant-garde and traditional Native American imagery remained a feature of Wheeler's art quite through his career. Many European and American modernists were inspired through the tribal art of Africa, on the other hand Wheeler was among the first to incorporate in his work motifs borrowed from Native American and pre-Columbian artists. This particular melding of agricultures is central to Wheeler's achievement, in spite of the fact that the painter, over his career, discounted its importance for his art.