Steve Wheeler

Background

Mr. Wheeler was born in the country of Slovakia in the year 1912. The artist was born with the name of Stephen Brosnatch. As a youngster, his family emigrated to New Salem, Pennsylvania, United States.

Education

Steve Wheeler left school at the age of sixteen. After graduation, Mr. Wheeler became a coal miner. While working in the coal mines with his father, he continued to read and study voraciously. His readings on art were a particular passion, and he soon determined to leave the mines to become an artist. He left Pennsylvania for Chicago to study with his uncle, a commercial illustrator, and probably also took art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1931 he moved to Pittsburgh, where he may have continued his training at the Carnegie Institute. In 1932 Steve Wheeler began studies in New York at the Art Students League and with Hans Hofmann, under whom he developed his own theories of space in painting. Mr. Hofmann played an integral role in shaping Wheeler's ideas about art, emphasizing the importance of Cubism, abstracting from nature, two-dimensionality and the push-pull of positive and negative space.

Career

Mr. Wheeler was dissatisfied with simply reworking the ideas of older artists, he wanted to expand on the Cubists' concept of space and needed a new pictorial language with which to do so. In order to develop his own ideas, Wheeler withdrew to Pittsburgh in 1939. In Pittsburgh, Wheeler felt a greater freedom to define his artistic identity. He remained in close contact with fellow League students Peter Busa and Robert Barrell, and in 1940 he returned to New York, drawn by the active art community and developing trends in European and American modernism.

Steve Wheeler's ideas about art continued to germinate in the fertile milieu of New York in the early 1940's, and in 1940-1941 he produced his first mature work. These small panels display Wheeler's innovative assimilation of a variety of sources, including Cubism, Surrealism and American Indian art. In particular, some influences on his art include Paul Klee and Joan Miró, whose paintings were shown in two separate exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941. Also in 1941, the Modern mounted the landmark exhibition India Art of the United States. This was among the earliest efforts to display and interpret Native American art outside the confines of an ethnographical or anthropological museum, and marked the broad acceptance of these tribal works as art objects rather than archaeological artifacts. As a result, interpretations of American India and Pre-Columbian art and culture, once the province of specialists in the field, were not made accessible to the general public.

Wheeler and his friends Barrell and Busa had begun to visit collections of tribal art at the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Heye Foundation as early as 1937. By the early 1940s, Wheeler had found the ideal visual language for his work in the art of the Northwest Coast Indians, an ideographic art in which image, symbol and myth came together. The idea of appropriating primitive forms in modernist painting was certainly not new. Europeans and Americans from Pablo Picasso to Marsden Hartley had incorporated such imagery into their paintings earlier in the century. Wheeler's approach to primitive art was more closely aligned with that of Paul Klee, whose ideas on nature and abstraction, fantasy, and the subconscious were enormously influential to him. By the early 1940s, however, Wheeler, along with many of his contemporaries, began to take their study of Native American art further than earlier generations of artists by reading anthropological texts and attempting to understand its formal and symbolic principles.

Steve Wheeler was linked with the Indian Space painters at the height of his career during the 1940s and 1950s. The group was a loose federation of New York artists offering an alternative to the emerging Abstract Expressionists. Wheeler pioneered this movement, though he consistently denied being a member of the group. Expanding the visual language of American modernism through the exchange and synthesis of ancient and modern mythology, art, and ideas, Wheeler and the Indian Space Painters - Will Barnet, Robert Barrell, Peter Busa, Gertrude Barrer, and others - made richly colored, intricately patterned works.

Other visual sources for Wheeler included American folk art, Slovak folk art, children's art, decorative patterns, cartography, mechanical drawing, and calligraphy. Steve Wheeler deftly combined his own formal language with decorative patterns and calligraphic lines. This synthesis of these various sources resulted, by 1942-1943, in a highly individualized form of abstraction. Yet, while he contributed to the trend of 1940s abstraction, he insisted that his work was always profoundly representational, figuring his life experiences in potent combinations of forms.

He used historical, mythological, and literary sources for his paintings, but he often found his subjects in contemporary culture: movies, radio shows, popular songs, jazz, and advertising. He also used fragments from his own life and experience - magazine clippings, visual and linguistic puns, catchy phrases, people he know - distilling them through the veil of his unconscious to create his fanciful and fantastic compositions. From these sources, and from his own reading, study, and experience, Mr. Wheeler created his own archetypal characters specific to the era in which he lived.

In 1947 Mr. Wheeler produced Hello Steve, a limited edition book of silkscreen prints and essays that expressed his highly personal artistic theories. The subjects of the prints included several of these archetypes that recur in his paintings, drawings, and writings.

Achievements

• Steve Wheeler's work is a crystallization of the many ideas and theories that were in the air at the time and which affected an entire generation of artists. He was largely unappreciated for his pictures in his lifetime. His works were actively represented at a range of museums: American Fine Arts Galleries (1941), Buchholz Gallery (1943), Santa Barbara Museum (1948), Brooklyn Museum (1947-1951), Tanager Gallery (1962), Richard York Gallery (1999), David Findlay Jr. Fine Art (2004), etc. In 1949 he was awarded Annual Purchase Prize.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • The Gold Cord

  • Little Joe Picking His Nose

  • Two Smiles

  • Wild Billy

  • Untitled W098

  • Laughing Boy Rolling

  • Laughing Boy

  • Untitled #39

  • Untitled W22 (Man Looking at Pork Chop)

  • The Messenger

  • Pica of T

  • Prelude in Red

  • Man Menacing Woman

  • Young Man Talking to His Mother-in-Law

  • Jack-in-the-Box

  • Introducing Miss America II

  • Julius Mayer Sonia

  • Strangers

  • Woman Eating a Hot Dog

  • Brooklyn in Q-T Formation

  • On a Chilly Knight

  • Newbe

  • Thunder and Short Beer

  • Untitled, W86

  • Panel of Joy

  • The Fox Went Out

  • The Power of Memory

  • Marine Garden

  • Big Shape

  • Peg Taking a Drag

  • Prelude in Red

  • Julius Mayer Sonia

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

Personality

Steve Wheeler continually struggled to portray himself as a unique artist unrestricted by current trends and movements in modern art. He was contemptuous of the art world upon which he depended for publicity and success. He had an insatiable thirst for knowledge and was fascinated by many different fields, from art to anthropology to psychoanalysis, and dipped into each of these areas to take what he needed to create his art.

Quotes from others about the person

• David Brody: "He always had fans - the work’s sheer persistent quality keeps it alive. As the wheel of poetic injustice turns, Wheeler now begins to seem, to many contemporary artists, more directly relevant than the canonical New York School artists. Art history pinches back on itself all the time - particularly American art history, in which, for example, the dogged conservatism of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Charles Burchfield, or Edward Hopper becomes avant-garde in retrospect. So was Wheeler just ahead of his time? Certainly he must have believed that, or he couldn’t have packed so much heat into the paintings. They just burn and burn as you look at them."
  
  Drew Lowenstein: "Regardless of Wheeler’s contemporary appeal, for me he stands out because he resists polish and sometimes pushes composition to the edge of comprehension. Unlike the Transcendental Group in Taos, or the modernists in New York who floated politely assembled geometries, Wheeler’s compositions seem to build volcanic pressure internally. Though he made preparatory drawings, when we look at Wheeler’s paintings he seems to be wrestling with energetic forces that he can barely keep a lid on. He willingly stepped into treacherous territory. I guess this is also why we like him, he really means it…he is a believer."

Connections

Steve Wheeler married Elsbet Margot Peterson in 1939.

Wife:

Elsbet Margot Peterson

References

• Hello Steve: The Works of Steve Wheeler
• Steve Wheeler: The Oracle Visiting the 20th Century
• Steve Wheeler: A new modernist language.