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PARTISAN REVIEW
Wheeler, who was only nine years younger than Gottlieb but out–
lived him by seventeen, was a reclusive painter whose work, executed
mostly in the 1940s, was virtually unknown at the time of his death in
1991. According to the exhibition catalogue, his last solo show in New
York was in 1954, his last group participation in 1962. His pictures are
modest in size, jazzily diverse in color, and packed, to the point of obses–
sion, with tightly-bounded, interlocking images that clearly reflect his
fascination with Native American sources. The cursive glyphs of North–
west Coast tribal art and the whiplash drawing style of South West
pottery decoration, along with the elaborations of Mayan sculpture all
resonate through Wheeler's imagery, enriched by a kind of Surrealist
charge. These pictures have been hailed as exemplifYing a diversity in
American art of the forties that was obscured by the ascendency of Ab–
stract Expressionism - see "Clement Greenberg, conspiracy theory" - but
in fact, they seem very much of a piece, in content, if not strictly in form,
with the work of such card-carrying Abstract Expressionists as Pollock
and Gottlieb, from the same years. Like Wheeler and like many of their
colleagues of the period, Pollock and Gottlieb suscribed to notions of the
universality of both myth and the forms that embody myth in different
cultures; like Wheeler, they were profoundly influenced by indigenous
American art, with an admixture of Picasso and Surrealist theory.
Wheeler's imagery and conception of space remains closer to their sources
than Pollock's or Gottlieb's did, even in the 1940s, but their spirit is very
similar.
It's not surprising, since Wheeler's formation was not unlike that of
the better- known members of the New York School: a year at the Chi–
cago Art Institute, the Art Students' League from 1932 to 1936, followed
by Hans Hofmann's School until 1938. What sets Wheeler's work apart
from even the most similarly motivated efforts of his colleagues, however,
is a sense that the physical stuff of paint was a necessity to be pressed into
the service of depiction, rather than an expressive element in its own
right. Pollock's canvases of the early forties reveal an indebtedness to Na–
tive American imagery and a
horror vacuui
that keep pace with Wheeler's -
no light comparison - but individual events in Pollock's paintings are al–
ways subsumed by a continuous expanse of tactile paint. In the same way,
while Gottlieb's
Pictographs
of the forties depend, like Wheeler's pictures,
on arrays of invented glyphs, informed by - among other things - tribal
artifacts, sensuous layering of paint, excavation and overpainting play sig–
nificant roles, creating a surface that is as expressive as the images
themselves.
Wheeler is clearly a painter worth acknowledging, but I would sug–
gest that he should be seen as one more exponent of a New York
zeitgeist
