Visitors to the Long Island home of Henry Luce III in the 1990s would have seen prominently displayed in the living room a magnificent oil painting from the 1940s by Steve Wheeler. The arts patron and scion of the Time Inc. publishing empire could easily have afforded a multi-million-dollar canvas by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning or Mark Rothko, but instead he opted for the virtually unknown Wheeler to occupy this choice wall space. Even today, many—if not most—scholars of American art have never heard of Wheeler, who is the leading figure in a group of artists known as the Indian Space Painters.

Who were these forgotten artists? The exotic, intriguing name they gave themselves would suggest they were Indians working out in the wide-open spaces of the West, but ironically, they were city slickers—New Yorkers, mostly by adoption. The first generation of Indian Space Painters, Wheeler, Peter Busa and Robert Barrell, met as students at the Art Students League in the late 1930s and then studied with the legendary European Modernist Hans Hofmann, who had abandoned his famous Munich school after the rise of Hitler and re-established himself in New York, on 8th Street in Greenwich Village. Hofmann combined Picasso’s fractured Cubist space with Matisse’s abstract use of color. Another influence on Wheeler, Busa and Barrell was Surrealism, a style that dominated the 1930s and investigated the unseen realities of the mind, the unconscious psychological forces and primitive urges that drive all humans. In 1936, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a landmark exhibition on Dada and Surrealism, which had an untold impact on the then-small New York art world. The show triggered an interest in tribal cultures, which the artists perceived as being closer to nature, and thus to basic human instincts and elemental truths, than advanced civilization.

The Indian Space Painters were especially attracted to American Indian culture. They were regular visitors to the ethnographic dioramas and exhibits at the Museum of National History, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of the American Indian (then called the Heye Foundation). In particular they were drawn to the objects of the Northwest Coast Indians, admiring the way the Indian artists reduced nature to flat, linear symbols and created images in which it was nearly impossible to distinguish positive from negative space. To them, these 18th- and 19th-century artifacts anticipated 20th-century modernism. More importantly, the Space Painters perceived these abstract images as embodying elemental truths.

Wheeler is generally recognized as the group’s leader and was among the first of them to embrace Indian aesthetics, as can be seen in works such as “The Clarinet Player,” 1945–50, and “Laughing Boy Rolling,” 1946. These brightly colored paintings, reflecting Hofmann’s palette of intense primary and secondary hues, are filled with Indian abstractions of masks, animals, eyes and such elemental forces as the sun, moon, sky and water. These works contain traces of the abstract patterning of Pablo Picasso—the dominant figure in 1930s art world and the one that every artist tried to match and better—and Joan Miró. Another influence was the nonobjective work of the American Abstract Artists, especially Burgoyne Diller, Charles Shaw and George L.K. Morris, members of a group formed in 1936 for the purpose of carrying the banner of Modernism and abstract art against the onslaught of representational Social Realism and American Scene Painting, which the social concerns of the Depression seemed to favor. While not members of the American Abstract Artists, Wheeler and his companions were similarly dedicated to the cause of abstraction. It is revealing, however, that Wheeler’s Indian-inspired, tightly interlocking forms and very busy, complicated compositions are more two-dimensional and airless than anything produced by their artistic predecessors. We could never mistake a Wheeler for a Picasso, Diller or Stuart Davis, to mention another great American 1930s abstract painter.

While attracted to the same sources, Wheeler’s colleagues developed distinct styles. Barrell’s paintings are compositionally similar to Wheeler’s in their interlocking forms, but their palette is different. Busa’s paintings, such as “The Thing in the Present,” 1946, are more painterly and less hard-edged, and reflect his close relationship with the Parisian Surrealist Roberto Matta, who settled in New York at the outbreak of war. Busa met weekly with Matta, Pollock, William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell to make Surrealist automatic drawings, and the wild, wiry, curving lines and patterning in his paintings reflect the rapid, unconscious movement of the arm and hand that within two years would lead Pollock to create his first drip paintings. By 1943, Howard Daum, who was responsible for coining the term “Indian Space Painters,” joined the group, and like Wheeler, he worked with a mosaic of emblematic shapes—although, as can be seen in his “Untitled (#264),” circa 1946, his early work was influenced by and had a playfulness reminiscent of Paul Klee and a Miró-like black line.

In the spring of 1946, one year before Pollock’s landmark exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, the group held its first and only exhibition, “Semeiology or 8 and a Totem Pole,” at Gallery Neuf on East 79th Street. By then they had been joined by Gertrude Barrer and Ruth Lewin, the former wielding a darker palette than her colleagues, the latter a consummate printmaker whose style had a jagged, abrupt, piercing quality often found in wood- and linoleum cuts. Before the year was out, the Space Painters also included Helen DeMott, whose 1946 painting “The Beach” was illustrated in the group’s magazine, Iconograph, first published in conjunction with the show and dedicated to demonstrating how Native American art could serve as a foundation for contemporary American art.