May 26, 2022 - Sale 2606

Sale 2606 - Lot 110

Price Realized: $ 1,875
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
PETER BUSA (1914 1985, AMERICAN)
Indian Space Drawing #1.

Pencil on paper, c. 1940. 235x273 mm; 9 1/4x10 3/4 inches.

Provenance: Gary Snyder Fine Art, NY.

Gary Snyder is a champion of artists who for any number of reasons never received the attention their work and chosen artistic paths deserved. Steve Wheeler, and the Indian Space Painter movement that followed him, has a story that belongs in the annals of American modernist history. Snyder Fine Art held four important exhibitions focused on Steve Wheeler and his peers:
Mythic Space, 1991.
Hello Steve: Works from the 1940s by Steve Wheeler, 1992.
Steve Wheeler, A New Modernist Language,1994.
Steve Wheeler: Selected Works and the Artist's Library, also on view, A Memorial Exhibition of Works on Paper by Robert Barrell, and Works on Paper from the 1940s by Gertrude Barrer, 1996.
Lots 110 - 120 in this catalog are works on paper by Steve Wheeler's friend, Peter Busa, and Art Students League peers Gertrude Barrer and Helen DeMott. The Art Students League was the haven for artists to exchange ideas and develop art theory for this and many other generations of artists. Will Barnet, also a practitioner of Indian Space painting, taught a course at the League emphasizing the visual language found in indigenous cultures of the Americas.