Steve Wheeler at Snyder Fine Art - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

tender-hearted Greenberg praised Steve Wheeler in a review he wrote for The Nation in 1943 In 1946 also in The Nation, he identified Wheeler as a principal figure among the painters inspired by the agency of the art of the Northwest Coast Indians. Wheeler took exception to being in like manner identified and in an unclose letter said that his work originateed from his own researches. at the same time there was a germ of fact in what Greenberg wrote, for aspects of Wheeler's diction overlap works by Peter Busa, Robert Barrell, Gertrude Barrer, Howard Daum and Helen De Mott who made up the Indian Space Group

Wheeler had studied with Vytlacil at the Art Students' League and then with Hofmann, on the other hand he rejected the latter's teachings. He felt that Hofmann's version of Cubism got in the way of a veritable picture of the world. Always influenced by dint of Paul Klee to some expanse Wheeler turned to the arts of distant times, to ancient Mexican manuscripts whose images relate to calendrical, cosmological and theological matters, and level more to the ideograms and pictographs of ancient Peruvian textiles. Along the way he certainly examined the work of the Northwest Coast Indians.

In 1947 Wheeler execut and published a volume of silkscreens based on his paintings, which he titled Hello Steve The not absent exhibition, a kind of memorial, was built around this volume and included his paintings as well as his prints. All his works upon view dated from the '40 Supplementing these were selections from the Indian Space collection as well as some paintings by the agency of Will Barnet and Byron Browne

The greatest in quantity original and personal part of Wheeler's work is his use of line. It operates to make contours for several surfaces simultaneously, and it travels, looping around to define planes, eventually branching not on like the lines on maps of the of recent origin York City subway system. Wheeler, like Stuart Davis, made icons of everyday ultimate parts (electric light plugs, outlets and scaly buds bicycle wheels, vacuum cleaners) as well as human features (eye mouths) wedging them into geometric shapes. They are abstract, although it is not the abstraction of non-objective or constructivist art. Each work is mysterious and hermetic and charged with vitality. There is something religious about them. When I think of Wheeler's works, Mondrian's words appear to apply: "The abstract is inwardness brought to its clearest definition, or externality interiorized to the highest degree"

Steve Wheeler merits to be better known. single of his friends was Ad Reinhardt, who wrote Wheeler's name upon a leaf hanging from individual of his art trees published in the tabloid PM and who participated in the "Four O'Clock Forums" organized by dint of Wheeler and Barnet as a counterirritant to the Artists bludgeon on Eighth Street. After 1950 Wheeler exhibited alone rarely, and more or les dropp from sight. in 1955 he stopped teaching at Cooper Union. He began to quarrel with his friends. He died in his studio in 1982 at the age of 80

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