TLB Origin Stories (1)

origin stories native paradigms in ameriCan abstraCt art T he quest for an independent American abstract art motivated many artists throughout South and North America from the 1920s through the 1950s. Faced with the apparent failure of modern civilization and the chaos of world war, abstract artists in the Americas began to look in earnest for a new pictorial tradition. Rejecting the dominant figurative styles of the time, such as Mexican muralism, Social Realism, tricia laughlin bloom and Regionalism, these artists were drawn instead to the rational and universalist themes of Concrete and Constructivist art, both forms of nonrepresentational abstract art. 1 Familiar with European abstraction, in particular Piet Mondrian’s Neo-Plastic geometries, Paul Klee’s primitivist constructions, and the Cubist abstractions of Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, American artists searched for alternative inspiration in Pre-Columbian and Native American art.2 Abstractionists in the Americas tempered the machine-age themes and formal severity of European Constructivism by making reference to local environments and indigenous crafts. Hand-carved stone and wood, textiles, pottery, and ancient architecture provided specifically American influences. This resulted in a new kind of abstraction that embodies a contradiction: these works are nonobjective and yet contextually specific, incorporating symbols and patterns with both universal and recognizably American sources. Pioneering abstractionists like Joaquín Torres-García, George L. K. Morris, Josef and Anni Albers, Francisco Matto, Lygia Pape, and Louise Nevelson advanced a heterogeneous Constructivist imagery that draws on ancient paradigms of balance and order to create a restrained, distinctively American mode of expression. 3 The particular agendas of the artists considered here were as diverse as the individuals and the national cultures that fostered them, from the Pre-Columbian revivalism of the Taller Torres-García (Torres-García’s workshop) in Uruguay to the mystical and universalist 60 P L AT E 2 0 Rosa Acle, Norte (North), 1938 origin stories S 61 concerns of Raymond Jonson and the Transcendental vary from one tribe to the next, the varied geometric American Museum of Natural History, the Museum of laid the groundwork for a native Brazilian modernism Painting Group in New Mexico. While there is no abstract styles that evolved in the Americas before the the American Indian, Heye Foundation in New York, fostered by writers and artists. The poet José Oswald de single story to explain this indigenous tendency in mid-twentieth century reveal common threads upon and the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris Andrade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto” of 1928 reclaimed the modern art of the Americas, and no homogeneity closer inspection. Building on these artists’ desires were bringing both ancient and living traditions of Brazil’s indigenous culture as a source of pride. The should be assumed, the fact remains that there are to communicate beyond nationalistic concerns, this Northwest Coast tribes and other Native Americans cultural movement this manifesto inspired contested correspondences between these North and South origin story reconstructs the evolution of abstract art to the attention of the general public. the colonialist assumption that formerly colonized American abstractionists that are often overlooked. in the Americas by considering what North and South Beginning in the 1930s, a series of large-scale people necessarily retain the disempowered identity César Paternosto exposed this gap in modernist art American artists shared in looking to indigenous art. exhibitions in the United States cultivated a conceptual implied by terms such as “primitive.” Andrade’s histories when he declared that “the detection of an In tracing parallels and overlaps in compositional home for Native American and Pre-Columbian art manifesto used the metaphor of cannibalism to artistic phenomenon in the Americas occurring along structure, materials, techniques, and a common within mainstream US culture. Cahill’s 1933 survey suggest that, in creating new art forms of their own, the North/South axis is not even revisionist history: language of linear designs and geometric patterning, of Pre-Columbian art for the Museum of Modern Art, Brazilian modernists would consume and digest the it is unwritten history.” Art history has treated North a fuller picture emerges of modern abstraction in the American Sources of Modern Art, established the idea art of their colonizers. 14 and South American modernism separately; in the Americas. of an aesthetic heritage linking Pre-Columbian and Montevideo quickly became the site of a modernist modern art. Another pioneering show that changed culture upon Torres-García’s return in the mid-1930s. the way Anglo-Americans viewed Native Americans Evidence of the growing interest in ancient art can be 4 process important formal and technical sources for American abstraction have been overlooked. 5 Roots How ancient American art became intertwined The year 1920 marked a significant shift toward a was The Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts. Organized by found in Torres-García’s scrapbooks from the 1930s with modern abstraction is a cross-cultural and modern art of the Americas rooted in native traditions. John Sloan and Amelia White, this comprehensive and ’40s. He carefully clipped and saved articles docu- interdisciplinary question that involves shifting Early that year, Joaquín Torres-García collaborated presentation of American Indian art opened at New menting archeological sites from leading Argentine paradigms in anthropology and museum practices, with Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros on a York’s Grand Central Art Galleries in 1931 and then newspapers such as La Prensa and La Nación. These issues of national and cultural identity, and a desire publication titled Vida americana (American Life). This traveled to fourteen other cities. In 1941, Indian Art articles, with detailed descriptions and photographs among New World artists to cast off colonialist journal produced only one issue, but the essays it of the United States became the first true blockbuster of Copan, Quiriguá, and other Pre-Columbian sites, traditions. 6 Most of the American artists who used contained asserted that Pre-Hispanic cultures were at the Museum of Modern Art. This comprehensive were used as instructional tools in Torres-García’s indigenous sources did not have direct connections the source of the true American heritage. Later that exhibition included sand painters at work as well as Asociación de Arte Constructivo. 15 or a family lineage linking them directly with native year, Torres-García moved to New York City where large-scale reproductions of ancient pictographs and traditions in the Americas, and many approached he began interacting with the New York avant-garde, a Northwest Coast totem pole. ancient American art from a formal perspective. Yet which had recently turned its attention to Native Throughout South America in the early twentieth An account of an exhibition of Pre-Columbian textiles nearly all aspired to revive the perceived authenticity American and Pre-Columbian art. In June 1920, a century, writers and artists advocated the revival of held at the Montevideo Athenaeum in 1936 suggests and greatness of ancient civilizations. Working in an few months prior to Torres-García’s arrival in New indigenous traditions as a means of asserting cultural that the Taller made the most of such opportunities era dominated by Euro-American enthusiasm for Pre- York, the Society of Independent Artists exhibited autonomy. Columbian and Native American art, two US artists the work of Pueblo watercolorists alongside other expanded field projects brought major Pre-Columbian of Native American descent, Joe H. Herrera and Leon contemporary artists—an unprecedented instance sites to light. 13 Indigenous themes taken up by Back to a Beginning Polk Smith, offer examples of strategies for bridging of Native American art presented as fine art rather painters in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil were After establishing himself among the leading modern- the divide between native traditions and modernist than anthropology.9 The Pueblo artists were welcomed early precursors to the rebirth of appreciation for ists of Paris, in 1934 Torres-García returned to his native aesthetics. enthusiastically by the New York art world. Holger ancient art that occurred in Uruguay in the 1930s. Uruguay. Through written manifestos, public lectures, Cahill, for example, wrote that the Pueblo paintings Brazil also experienced a growing enthusiasm for its radio addresses, and studio instruction, he promoted his theory of Constructive Universalism, encouraging 7 Traditional cultures around the world have 8 12 11 In Peru, archeological publications and Torres-García called for the study of indigenous art through archeological excursions to these ancient sites. to study ancient art up close. developed origin stories—either oral or written—which “mark the birth of a new Art in America.” Across the Indian cultures from the 1920s through the 1940s. An are passed along from one generation to the next country in New Mexico, modern artists were engaged avant-garde movement was established in São Paulo South Americans to embrace native traditions and cast to describe how the world and all things within it with Pueblo cultures in the Santa Fe and Taos artists’ beginning with the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week off outworn European culture. In advocating for what came to be. Just as Native American origin stories colonies that had emerged by 1920. Exhibitions at the of Modern Art) in 1922; this watershed arts festival he called “The New Art of America,” Torres-García 62 10 origin stories S 63 production in different guises. Construction (1931) (plate 21) consists of a series of carved wooden blocks that interlock to suggest a jaunty freestanding figure, devoid of facial features and painted in mottled tones of red, white, and blue. A network of incised lines unites the asymmetrical composition, giving this “abstract man” both a provisional sketchiness and the look of a measuring device, such as a ruler or compass, personified. A similar schematic figure recurs throughout Torres-García’s pictographic paintings of the 1930s and ’40s, and it accompanies his original Fi g. 1 Temple of the Sun, Pisac, Peru, c. 1500. © Philip Baird / anthroarcheart.org handwritten treatise, “The Tradition of the Abstract Man.” 19 The function of ordering emanates from this ordinary yet archetypal figure; the work appears to be did not proceed from nationalistic motivations but a template, drawn from the past and projecting into from a broader perspective that embraced tribal cul- the future. In the painting Composition (1932) (plate tures of both North and South America. He described 22), Torres-García arranged pictographic images within “a great desire for unification . . . arising in all the a grid that calls to mind both Inca stonework and de Americas” and referred to “the great Indo-American Stijl paintings, as well as the mystical, mathematical His doctrine of Constructive Universalism system of proportions known as the golden mean. 20 was explicitly humanistic, drawing on the spiritual The spare black line, the scumbled brushwork, and function of Pre-Columbian art and connecting the the palette of mud red, brown, and gray give this great tectonic structures of the past with modern painting a premodern aura. The pictographic symbols geometric art. evoke a range of traditions: classical proportions in family.” 16 17 Torres-García’s art was rooted in the structural the arched colonnade, spiritual ascendency in the logic and simplicity of Pre-Columbian architecture ladder, and the New World in the sailing ship. Em- and planar textile designs. In his grids and frontal bedded within this matrix, the abstract man stands compositions, and in the work of his students—Rosa poised for action. Acle, Francisco Matto, and others—the architectural In returning to Uruguay in 1934, Torres-García construction of Pre-Columbian Inca stonework (fig. 1) perceived a land ripe for cultivating a new art. is a defining influence. Although the overall pattern is Uruguay was, like the United States, a young country a highly organized system of horizontal and vertical of immigrants; unlike the United States, however, lines, the asymmetry of the hand-chiseled stones Uruguay’s indigenous people (the Charruas) “had Acle’s Norte long since been absorbed into the predominantly (North) (1938) (plate 20) features irregularly sized European society.” 21 Torres-García was sensitive to blocks that fit together like Inca stonework. Painted his own European heritage and the traps of falling in tones of slate, gray, and brown, these forms evoke into either folkloric or political uses of indigenous a slab of stone more than a painted surface. sources. He stated that “although we are not completely gives Inca stonework an organic quality. 18 A grid format appears throughout Torres-García’s native, we are from here. Our generation should be P L AT E 2 1 Joaquín Torres-García, Construction, 1931 64 origin stories S 65 a new one, which attempts to relate to this land by sense of order and harmony in Native American art, penetrating into its depths . . . Whatever we are, pure which also contributed greatly to the development or mixed, of native blood or not . . . our password of his own abstraction. 26 As he wrote in 1936, should be . . . to delve into the living bowels of the earth; to take root in it forever.” 22 Organic metaphors The essential impulse in the search for an associating a new American art with the fertile soil of authentic culture must be a movement America also appear in the writings of New York art backwards . . . until the artist can find a critics and curators before the mid-twentieth century. place to rest his feet securely. All the past Walter Pach, art critic for The New York Times and a civilizations have begun this way. If an central figure in the New York avant-garde, was active authentic American culture is to arise, we in promoting Native American art in the 1920s. Pach must go back to a beginning. 27 described a new American art modeled on the indigenous art of the Americas; his language is reminiscent of Morris’ conceptual journey back in time emphasizing Torres-García’s exhortation to “penetrate the depths ancient art as the stable ground from which to move of the land.” American art forward has a parallel with Torres-García’s vision of a new modern art built on the foundations This soil has affected the character of the of the Pre-Columbian past. 28 American [US] people. Our environment, our By 1937, Morris’ own Indian subjects had become air, our waters and forests are what make increasingly abstract as he struggled to follow his own Americans different from their cousins . . . exhortations to create paintings of simplicity and of the old world. The art of the Indians, so strength. 29 Morris filled multiple sketchbooks with eloquent of this land, is American art, and drawings of objects observed in the Native American of the most important kind. collections in New York museums and on a trip to 23 Santa Fe in the early 1930s. 30 The sketches reveal During his years in New York, Torres-García associated fragments of Native American objects that Morris with Pach, as well as with John Graham and others arranged within fields of biomorphic and trapezoidal actively involved with the nascent Indian art move- forms. At the center of Ascension #2 (1937) (plate ment in the early 1920s. In all likelihood there was 23), a graphic black form evokes a bird head with an an exchange of ideas between Torres-García and those elongated beak; reeds and seedpods also appear against promoting Native American art in New York. 24 planes of earth tones and vivid color. Embedded in Like Torres-García, George L. K. Morris saw a vital the upper left corner is another birdlike form; flat and link between the art of the ancient Americas and wooden in appearance, it is rendered in a palette of contemporary abstraction. A well-known abstract artist tans and browns and shaded to suggest a hand-carved and art critic in New York City before World War II, object. The spiritual associations of the title and the Morris was instrumental in creating an audience for references to nature and indigenous objects reflect American abstraction and was constant in his praise Morris’ aspirations for a modern American art both of Native American art. P L AT E 2 2 25 While Morris’ aesthetic was native and universal. influenced by the European modernists with whom Indian Concretion (1938) (fig. 2) further illustrates he studied and exchanged ideas, he was drawn to the Morris’ process of adapting Native American designs. Joaquín Torres-García, Composition, 1932 66 origin stories S 67 It contains several basic elements that recur in Morris’ Indian compositions of the late 1930s, including a stylized bird head like the central form in Ascension #2. The multiple versions of Indian Concretion attest to the importance Morris attached to this composition.31 The small, toothlike spikes at the center of the composition may derive from the feathered headdresses prevalent in Morris’ earlier narrative paintings, and the organic pointed shapes are reminiscent of leaves or bear claws.32 Again the dominant form is an abstracted bird’s head in profile. The eye of the bird is rendered in the stylized convention of Northwest Coast designs, known as a formline ovoid, as seen in Chilkat blankets (fig. 3). The juxtaposition of diverse cultural traditions reflects Morris’ formalist approach to creating paintings and relative disregard for the semiotic power of his indigenous sources. Morris’ Indian compositions and Torres-García’s paintings from the 1930s share overlapping sources and structural concerns with Adolph Gottlieb’s pictograph Fi g. 2 George L. K. Morris, Indian Concretion, 1938. Oil on canvas, 453⁄8 x 361⁄8 in. (115.3 x 91.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. © Frelinghuysen Morris Foundation series. Although Gottlieb used Northwest Coast sources similar to those used by Morris, and a grid composition comparable to that of Torres-García, he did not approach these ancient models with the same Americanist agenda. Gottlieb’s interest in ancient art was influenced by psychology and anthropology studies linking modern man’s existential condition with the terror of “primitive” man. 33 Produced between 1941 and the mid-fifties, Gottlieb’s pictographs draw on primitive cultures from around the world.34 His sources for these grid compositions include the irregular cell format of Chilkat blankets and the additive structure and interwoven forms of Northwest Coast totem poles. The Mutable Objects (1946) (plate 24) especially reflects the influence of Northwest Coast designs.35 This geometric composition is built up of scumbled layers of paint; the rough-hewn effects of the factured surface and wood-toned palette evoke the painted wood surfaces P L AT E 2 3 George L. K. Morris, Ascension #2, 1937 68 Fi g. 3 Chilkat blanket (detail), Tlingit, Alaska, late nineteenth century. Mountain goat wool and cedar bark, 34 x 62 in. (86.4 x 157.5 cm) without fringe. Newark Museum, Gift of Mrs. C. W. Holzhauer, 1919, 19.627 of Haida totems. 36 Abstract signs and animal forms origin stories S 69 appear within a grid of irregularly sized rectangles; a narrow column aligned just left of the center gives a strong vertical emphasis, suggesting totemic sources. Near the top of this column appears the stylized head of a white bird, which in turn is topped by oversized eyes—together these form a composite mask. Iconic and Totemic In contrast to the network of diverse imagery found in the art of Gottlieb, Torres-García, and Morris, Francisco Matto’s wood constructions and paintings have a consolidated, iconic quality. This is in keeping with Matto’s deeply spiritual approach to the world and his art making; his quest for essential structures was guided by a belief in the spiritual aspect of all natural forms. An active member of Taller TorresGarcía in Montevideo, Matto spent years collecting and studying Peruvian textiles. In 1932, he traveled to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, where he made the Double-cloth textile fragment with stylized human and llama figures (detail), Inca, Peru, c. 1450–1532. Cotton, 26½ x 26¼ in. (67.3 x 66.7 cm). Newark Museum, Museum Purchase 1946, 46.132 first acquisitions in what was to become an extensive Like Matto, Louise Nevelson viewed wood as a Matto’s approach living material filled with mystery and magic; for was to isolate an element of Pre-Columbian design and both of these artists wood was the ideal material to enlarge that form, always keeping the image simple express the connection between the organic and the and allowing the inherent qualities of his materials spiritual. Nevelson’s geometric Constructivist aesthetic to come through. Construcción (Construction) (1948) was countered by a spiritual, quasi-alchemical view of (plate 25) appears to be a purely abstract freestanding the world; her titles refer to mythology, the natural wood construction. Although the natural bowing world, and history, yet the sculptures themselves and imperfections of the wood are visible through incorporate restrained tectonic structures and a collection of Pre-Columbian art. P L AT E 2 4 Fi g. 4 37 its saturated red paint, Construcción could almost be monochromatic palette. Coming from the divergent mistaken for a nonobjective exercise in mathematics realms of the Taller Torres-García and the postwar and proportions. Embedded within this Constructivist avant-garde in New York City, Matto and Nevelson form, however, is the likeness of a llama, a highly both made pilgrimages to ancient Pre-Columbian abstracted, geometric interpretation of the animal sites. Each was also directly influenced by ancient commonly found in Peruvian textile designs (fig. 4). freestanding totemic sculptures. 40 Nevelson’s use of Matto translated textile imagery into concise forms discarded wood further aligns her with the bricolage that bring together archaic and modernist motifs. 38 aesthetic of the Taller Torres-García. Just as the Taller As he explained, “There is neither an ancient art nor artists used reclaimed wood and burlap to create their a modern one, only art exists. Universal Art. It is the works, Nevelson gathered wood from the streets of greatest harmony a human being can attain.” New York City. 41 39 Adolph Gottlieb, The Mutable Objects, 1946 70 origin stories S 71 P L AT E 2 5 Francisco Matto, Construcción (Construction), 1948 P L AT E 2 6 Louise Nevelson, Dark Shadows, 1957 72 origin stories S 73 Dark Shadows (1957) (plate 26) is a vertical life, past and present. 46 One of the themes that Josef assemblage of irregular wood fragments affixed to a revisited throughout his career was the expressive narrow support. Like others of its type, Dark Shadows power of line—including the dimensions of pattern was conceived as a totem, intended to stand directly possible in a single continuous line. At Black Mountain on the ground rather than hanging on the wall as he developed a project for his students based on the relief sculpture. 42 Nevelson was greatly interested in meander, a geometrical motif occurring throughout indigenous art, like her friends Diego Rivera, Wolfgang Pre-Columbian art and architecture. Albers saw the Paalen, and Will Barnet, and she had a collection meander as successfully integrating line and form of Native American art. 43 Two archeological trips to and merging the Western conception of figure and Mexico and Guatemala were particularly influential to ground. “The lines are active and the leftover part is Nevelson’s development of totemic imagery. In 1950, just as active . . . The rhythm of the great meander she visited Mayan sites throughout the Yucatán, and is beautiful . . . no beginning, no end, stable and at later that same year she trekked to Quiriguá, Guatemala, rest, vertical, horizontal, male, female.” 47 a remote site that housed monumental Mayan stone In Tlaloc (1944) (plate 27), a single white line plays carvings, replicas of which Nevelson had first seen across a wood-grain background. Intersecting rhomboid at the American Museum of Natural History in New and triangular forms lead the eye across the frontal York. These thirty-foot stelae incorporate human plane before pivoting back in space. This spare form features within abstract fields of low relief sculpture, suggests simultaneously a hieroglyph, a mathematical reminiscent of the attenuated proportions and the design, and something more monumental, befitting ceremonial presence of Nevelson’s more intimate the ceremonial title: Tlaloc is an Aztec rain god. 48 The free-floating linear form in Tlaloc is related to Albers’ wooden totems. 44 earlier line drawings from 1936; evidence suggests Crossing Paths that these works are condensed views of ancient Pre- During the same years that Torres-García’s Constructive Columbian structures. 49 Like the shifting perspectives Universalism flourished in Uruguay, and while Morris, and intricate geometries of Albers’ Graphic Tectonics Gottlieb, and Nevelson were advancing indigenous art series (plate 28), the continuous line in Tlaloc has the in New York, Josef and Anni Albers were building an effect of an afterimage, tracing the outlines of ancient abstract modern language of their own, informed by architectural structures that Albers photographed and Pre-Columbian architecture and textiles. In 1933, the observed from multiple vantage points. couple left Nazi Germany and joined the faculty of While traveling in New Mexico, Albers made a Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. In connection with a kindred abstract artist, Raymond 1935, they took the first of many trips to Mexico, where Jonson.50 A leader of the Transcendental Painting Group they studied archeological sites and ancient textiles, of abstractionists based in Santa Fe, Jonson shared sketching and photographing the worlds of abstraction with Albers an interest in ancient and indigenous art that they observed. Josef wrote of the abundant models forms. 51 Some of Jonson’s strongest works from the of Pre-Columbian abstraction, “Mexico is truly the 1940s feature vividly colored linear patterns that bear Like Torres-García, a striking resemblance to Pueblo pottery designs. In Oil the Alberses sought out essential, timeless forms that No. 12 (1942) (plate 29), a black orb, possibly an eclipsed recurred across cultures and were embedded in daily sun, and a triangular linear pattern appear against a promised land of abstract art.” 74 45 P L AT E 2 7 Josef Albers, Tlaloc, 1944 origin stories S 75 P L AT E 2 8 Josef Albers, Graphic Tectonic, 1941 P L AT E 2 9 Raymond Jonson, Oil No. 12, 1942 76 origin stories S 77 cropped, mountainous form. The geometric pattern mid-1950s. An affinity for indigenous art runs through- generations, with a condensed aesthetic language described by a continuous line reflects Jonson’s artistic out Pape’s production, from her interest in Brazilian that captures some of the aura of tribal “abstract” exchange with Albers, but Oil No. 12 is also similar in weaving traditions to her appreciation for the feather forms. In many cases, well-intentioned appropria- format to later works by Jonson associated with Native art of the Tupinamba Indians. From 1955 to 1960, Pape tions of indigenous American art have been driven American themes, specifically the series from the mid- created a series of abstract woodcuts titled Tecelares by Euro-American desires for escape and authentic- 1940s that Jonson titled Pictographical Compositions.52 (Weavings). Sem título (Untitled) (1959) (plate 30), like ity. 59 Oswald de Andrade’s reinvention of Hamlet’s Jonson studied the geometric designs on the Pueblo the rest of the Tecelares series, is a spare geometric existential quandary, “Tupí or Not Tupí,” published in pottery in his own collection, as he also directed his composition of designs in black ink on rice paper. his 1928 “Cannibalist Manifesto,” opens up issues of students to do. A jar from the Acoma Pueblo (fig. 5) The roughly parallel lines of the wood-grain print fractured identity that have significance beyond the displays a repeated triangle pattern and swooping delineate a series of four vertical columns, slightly particular situation of modern Brazil. Brazilian mod- diagonals similar to the forms in Jonson’s painting. misaligned. The textural, organic quality of the wood ernists aligned themselves with the indigenous Tupí Anni Albers adopted both the techniques and the grain and the translucency of the paper are in tension (also called Tupinamba) and Guarani tribal cultures imagery of Pre-Columbian textiles, from her early with the minimalist composition. Like Josef Albers, as a strategy in rejecting European influence. Native training at the Bauhaus to her firsthand experience with Pape used wood grain to create overlapping signs; Americans in the United States at mid-century often Fi g. 5 Peruvian hand looms. Beginning in the mid-1930s, she in addition to the associations with indigenous art experienced a mixed reception as both exotic cultural Acoma water jar, Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico. Ceramic, 10 in. (25.4 cm). Newark Museum, Museum Purchase 1928, 28.1434 incorporated abstract designs from South America and that wood suggests, the columns of striated pattern commodities and social outsiders. For modern artists the American Southwest into her pictorial weavings.53 are reminiscent of the horizontal weft in weaving, raised in living tribal cultures, like Leon Polk Smith Tikal (1958) (fig. 6) is one of Albers’ textiles that not unlike the floating weft squares in Tikal. Drawn and Joe H. Herrera, issues of ethnicity and indigenous combines ancient and modern designs and methods. to the inherent “formal economy” of indigenous art, subject matter could not simply be appropriated; signs A series of textural squares against a loosely woven Pape observed, of identity had to be carefully weighed against popular 57 background naturally emphasizes the warp and weft— notions of Indian-ness and the critical bias against the vertical and horizontal threads, respectively, that Constructivists searched for a return to the provide the basic structure of textiles. Constructed beginning of things, and therefore the use Herrera, a pioneering abstract artist in New Mexico, the blue and green of geometric forms . . . I see that when one bridged tribal and modern contexts with his abstract squares meandering across the woven plane transform speaks of the abstraction of the Indian, one easel paintings of the early 1950s. A full member of the Tikal from a textile sample into a unique work of speaks from the point of view of the Eastern Cochiti community, born and raised, and a respected art. The abstract square pattern refers to the stepped man who, in the face of a geometric form, artist working in the Santa Fe Studio style, Herrera pyramid architecture at Tikal, a major center of Mayan assumes that it is an abstraction not linked to studied photography and worked in the anthropology civilization and one of the Pre-Columbian sites that reality. But for the Indian, that relationship laboratory at the University of New Mexico while he the Alberses studied in their travels. 55 The horizontal exists because the formal economy is the studied abstract painting with Raymond Jonson. 61 arrangement of these squares also refers to bands of result of a long-term creation. Jonson encouraged Herrera to look to his own cultural with an additional floating weft, 54 58 roots—Anasazi rock art, Pueblo pottery, and kiva murals. text, reflecting Anni’s belief in the power of textiles to communicate: “Along with cave paintings, threads The conceptual gap Pape described between the Untitled (1951) (plate 31) is an example of Herrera’s were among the earliest transmitters of meaning.” cultivated “Eastern man” (Euro-American) and the abstract style. What appears to be abstract to the indigenous artist reveals the predicament of nearly uninitiated eye, however, is undoubtedly replete with all primitivist modernism in the Americas. Each of meaning for a Cochiti who may read ancient signs The geometry of weaving also interested Lygia Pape, the artists considered thus far attempted to replace within the circular and ovoid forms overlapping with a founding member of Grupo Frente, the Concrete what Pape recognized as the “long-term creation,” landscape fragments. As Pape noted, abstract signs art movement that emerged in Rio de Janeiro in the the abstract cultural form that develops slowly over are steeped in reality for indigenous artists. Herrera 56 “Tupí or Not Tupí” Fi g. 6 Anni Albers, Tikal, 1958. Cotton, plain and leno weave, 30 x 23 in. (76.2 x 58.42 cm). Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Gift of the Johnson Wax Company through the American Craft Council, 1979. © 2009 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 78 autobiographical content. 60 origin stories S 79 P L AT E 3 1 Joe H. Herrera, Untitled, 1951 P L AT E 3 0 Lygia Pape, Sem título (Untitled), from the series Tecelares (Weavings), 1959 80 origin stories S 81 found himself in the unique position of reinterpreting by colored rectangles arranged against a tricolor the ancient art of his own culture through the lens background; the repetition of simple forms in red, of nonobjective and primitivist modern styles. The yellow, black, and white recalls Native American textile reception of his abstract canvases was mixed—both patterns. Shifting to an aerial perspective, OK Territory members of his Cochiti community and collectors also reads as a schematic map. Smith constructed of Indian art felt that such abstractions were not something iconic and universal from the arbitrary, Herrera redefined the notion of shifting boundaries that attempted to regulate tribal “Indian” enough. 62 tradition and opened up a space for other formal and narrative perspectives on tribal culture. cultures in Oklahoma. 66 Origin stories are about beginnings; this account of A midwesterner of Cherokee descent who grew indigenous sources in American abstract art exposes a up among the Chickasaw and Choctaw of Oklahoma, rich lineage in modern art that continued well beyond Leon Polk Smith created abstractions that merge Native the 1950s. The essential geometric language of the American and avant-garde geometries. Smith came ancient Americas appears throughout late-modern to New York in 1936 and went on to become one of abstraction, reinterpreted in the apparently minimalist the leading abstractionists of the post–World War II sculptures of Mathias Goeritz and Tony Smith, for art world. He repeatedly credited his sense of color instance. The ability of geometric abstraction—both and interest in space to the Oklahoma landscape and ancient and modern—to contain opposing states is the Chickasaw and Choctaw communities he grew up perhaps what attracted all of these American artists in, surrounded by richly patterned blankets, baskets, to Concrete form. As Torres-García wrote, “There is and the open spaces of the plains. In this regard, no longer any disparity between the form and what Smith embodies a contradiction—deeply connected to is expressed, for everything joins in perfect unity.” 67 his rural and Native American roots, he nevertheless Making use of symbols and materials readily available assimilated immediately with the intellectual culture of to them or encountered through travel, early abstract “With me, New artists in the Americas adapted ancient signs to bridge York City was love at first sight. Somehow it revealed handicraft traditions and the language of abstraction its physical self to me through the mountains and with a streamlined modern world. The visual realms canyons of the Southwest.”64 This ability to incorporate they constructed point to overlapping pathways and divergent experiences and to resolve overlapping a shared artistic heritage. New York City and nonobjective art. 63 signifiers defines Smith’s production as well as his social and cultural identifications. 65 Mondrian was the dominant influence informing Smith’s geometric compositions, yet many of the same paintings are replete with Native American influences. A small abstract canvas, OK Territory (plate 32) refers to the history of the relocation of the five tribes of Oklahoma. Smith built up a textured surface through meticulous layers of paint; up close the surface has a hand-hewn quality, as if carved in low relief from a wood panel. The picture plane is divided and redivided P L AT E 3 2 Leon Polk Smith, OK Territory, 1943 82 origin stories S 83 NOTES My appreciation to Mary Kate O’Hare and to Kathleen Ash-Milby for commenting on this essay, and to Ann Gibson for early research assistance. 1. In modern art, abstract forms are either derived directly from nature or, in the case of nonrepresentational abstraction, based on geometry and mathematical principles of order, balance, and spatial harmony, with little or no concern for the observable world. Concrete art and Constructivism are both forms of nonrepresentational abstraction that emerged in Europe and Russia in the early twentieth century; these terms have been adopted to describe later movements based on similar principles. See George Rickey, Constructivism: Origins and Evolutions, rev ed. (New York: George Braziller, 1995). 2. Pre-Columbian refers to ancient art produced before the arrival of Columbus in the New World, in the fifteenth century. As used in the context of art history, the term Native American blurs temporal distinctions, encompassing ancient (PreColumbian) artifacts as well as objects produced by living members of Native American tribes. Artists considered in this essay looked to both ancient and contemporary sources, although most focused on ancient art, which was perceived to have a greater degree of authenticity. 3. These artists share a certain amount of conceptual overlap with their contemporaries the Abstract Expressionists. For instance, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman were all deeply immersed in Native American art and culture during the same period. 4. César Paternosto, The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, trans. Esther Allen (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1996), 221. A contemporary abstractionist and a notable scholar of ancient and modern art, Paternosto has authored and curated pioneering studies of American abstraction, without which this essay would not have been possible. 5. The influence of African and Oceanic art as a force shaping modern art, especially Cubism and Surrealism, has been well established in twentieth-century art histories, while much less attention has been accorded to the indigenous sources of American abstraction. Abstract Expressionism is an obvious exception to this; see Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 49–120; W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1995). In recent years, a few outstanding exhibitions and scholarly publications have brought new attention to the ancient sources of American abstraction. See Brenda Danilowitz and Heinz Liesbrock, eds., Anni and Josef Albers: Latin American Journeys (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2007); César Paternosto, Cecilia de Torres, Lucy R. Lippard, et al., Abstraction: The Amerindian Paradigm (Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 2001); César Paternosto, North and South Connected: An Abstraction of the Americas (New York: Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., 1998). For an overview of primitivism, see William Stanley Rubin, “Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 2 vols. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). 6. While the scope of this essay does not allow for an in-depth look at the changes in government policies toward native populations, those changes also influenced the reception of 84 Pre-Columbian and Native American art in the early twentieth century. See, for instance, Elizabeth Hutchinson, “Handicraft, Native American Art, and Modern Indian Identity,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2006), 194–209; Margaret Dubin, “Sanctioned Scribes: How Critics and Historians Write the Native American Art World,” in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories, ed. W. Jackson Rushing III (New York: Routledge, 1999), 149–68; Rushing, Avant-Garde, 1–12. For an account of how indigenous cultures were incorporated into modern Brazil, see Seth Garfield, “‘The Roots of a Plant That Today Is Brazil’: Indians and the Nation-State Under the Brazilian Estado Novo,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29, no. 3 (October 1997): 747–68. 7. Herrera and Smith were not entirely unique in approaching modernist abstraction with a knowledge of Native American art understood through long-term immersion in tribal culture. The Ojibwe artist George Morrison moved between the worlds of Minnesota tribal culture and the Abstract Expressionist circle in New York City. See Bill Anthes, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2006), 102–13. 8. Cecilia de Torres, “Pilgramaje to the Sources of Amerindian Art,” in Paternosto et al., Amerindian Paradigm (see note 5), 247–48. 9. Pueblo watercolor paintings meticulously recorded tribal imagery, such as ceremonial dances and costumes, in a flat, illustrational style. This art form served practical desires on the part of both Pueblo artists and their patrons to foster a new art market. These works were also a means of preserving endangered tribal traditions through the simple act of documentation. See David W. Penney and Lisa A. Roberts, “America’s Pueblo Artists: Encounters on the Borderland,” in Rushing, Makers, Meanings, Histories (see note 6), 24–34. 10. Holger Cahill, writing for Studio International in 1922, cited in Penney and Roberts, “America’s Pueblo Artists,” 33. Cahill was an art critic and curator first at the Newark Museum and then at the Museum of Modern Art. He was also the director of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. 11. The title page to the exhibition catalogue reads, “To accompany the first exhibition of American Indian Art Selected Entirely With Consideration of Esthetic Value.” See Frederick Webb Hodge, Herbert J. Spinden, and Oliver La Farge, eds., Introduction to American Indian Art, 2 vols. (New York: Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, 1931). Amelia White, an early collector and activist for Native American rights, opened the first American Indian art gallery in New York in 1922. Artist John Sloan made his first trip to Santa Fe in 1919 and actively promoted Native American art. It is significant that Sloan also taught at the Art Students League, where his students included Adolph Gottlieb, Will Barnet, Barnett Newman, and George L. K. Morris—all of whom went on to promote Native American and Pre-Columbian art as a source for American abstract art. 12. Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth Century Art of Latin America (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2001), 13–74; Martin S. Stabb, In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890–1960 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1967), 59. 13. Barbara Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of Modern Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 277, 281. 14. José Oswald de Andrade, “Anthropophagite Manifesto,” Revista de Antropofagia, no. 1 (May 1928), translated in Dawn Ades, ed., Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 312, reprinted in Patrick Frank, ed., Readings in Latin American Modern Art (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2004), 24–27. 15. Joaquín Torres-García, “Pre-Columbian Art of the Andean Tradition,” Círculo y Cuadrado 1 (May 1936): 4. Thank you to Cecilia de Torres for sharing information related to these sketchbooks. For a summary of the art scene in Montevideo in the early twentieth century, see also Cecilia de Torres, “Montevideo: Constructive Universalism,” in Gabriel PérezBarreiro, The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, Univ. of Texas at Austin, 2007), 16–27. 16. Joaquín Torres-García, “The New Art of America,” trans. Anne Twitty, in El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and Its Legacy, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992), 76. 17. The adjective tectonic, of or having to do with construction or architecture, is derived from the Greek word for “carpenter” or “constructor,” as well as Latin and Indo-European words meaning “to weave.” In The Stone and the Thread Paternosto explains, “The word tectonic illuminates the primordial meaning of art, in which weaving and constructing are identified with the same semantic resonance” (165). 18. Inca stones varied in shape and texture. They were shaped by hammers made of hard stone and chiseled with bronze tools to fit together precisely, like puzzle pieces; no mortar was used in the joining of the exterior layers. See Paternosto, Stone and the Thread, 35–61. 19. Torres-García wrote, “Everything is within man. Not on a small scale but in its true dimensions. The tradition of civilization is the tradition of Abstract Man.” See Torres-García, “The Tradition of Abstract Man,” trans. Cecilia de Torres, in TorresGarcía: Grid-Pattern-Sign, Paris-Montevideo, 1924–1944 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), 105. 20. The golden mean, also known as the golden section or the golden ratio, is a system of mathematical proportions that dates back to ancient civilizations; based on ratios and geometry, architects and artists have used forms such as the golden rectangle to give their constructions a sense of balance and harmony. As Daniel Robins describes, “Torres-García encountered the idea of mystical proportions in contact with Masons or Rosicrucians, for as a profoundly spiritual but anticlerical person, he was for a long time fascinated with these quasi-religious groups. For Torres-García . . . it [the Golden Mean] refers not only to belief in the goodness of a Christian maxim for social behavior, but literally to the ruler divided into a large and a small segment . . . the ruler can also be a ladder. The Golden Mean is referred to by the compass, by all instruments of geometry, algebra, mathematics. It symbolized perfect unity.” Joaquín Torres-García, 1874–1949 (Providence: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1970), 29. 21. Braun, Pre-Columbian Art, 277. 22. Torres-García, “The New Art of America,” 76. 23. Walter Pach, “A Critic’s View of the Significance and Value of a Unique American Asset,” The New York Times, November 22, 1931, cited in Penney and Roberts, “America’s Pueblo Artists,” 38n47. See also Pach, “New-Found Values in Ancient America,” Parnassus 7, no. 7 (December 1935): 7–10, where he makes a similar argument using Mayan and Aztec examples. A. E. Gallatin wrote in 1940, “In some ways the soil here is fertile for artistic expression; for one thing it is not overcultivated as is the case in certain countries . . . and from it we may reasonably expect quite vigorous art forms to emerge.” See Gallatin, “The Plan of the Museum of Living Art,” in A. E. Gallatin Collection, “Museum of Living Art” (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1954), 9. 24. Pach was instrumental in finding Torres-García an apartment upon his arrival in New York in July 1920. Conversation with Cecilia de Torres, January 21, 2009. For more on their relationship, see Cecilia de Torres’ essay in this catalogue. In describing New York as the capital of artists in his journal, Torres-García mentions Pach and the annual exhibitions of the Society of Independent Artists. This is relevant given Pach’s writings on Indian art. Torres-García, New York (Montevideo: Museo Torres-García, 2007), 67. For a reference to TorresGarcía’s relationship to John Graham, see Torres-García: GridPattern-Sign, 114. 25. Morris was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group and served as editor of the journals Plastique (1937–39) and Partisan Review (1937–43). Morris also helped finance and establish Partisan Review; his art criticism laid a foundation of formalist aesthetics that was taken up by Clement Greenberg—who succeeded Morris as editor in 1943. Morris was also closely associated with A. E. Gallatin’s collection of European and American abstract art and Gallatin’s Gallery (later Museum) of Living Art, which was a key resource for many North American modernists. 26. Morris’ influences included Jean Arp, Fernand Léger, and Jean Hélion. At least thirty-seven finished Indian subjects are documented, and many sketchbooks contain studies for these and other Native American–themed works. Regrettably, many of these works have been lost or destroyed; many of the missing paintings can be seen in the George L. K. Morris Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, microfilm reel D337, Photographs-Works, 1938–1946. In order to fully assess the contribution that Morris made to American art of the 1930s and ’40s, his Indian subjects require further study. 27. “G. L. [sic] Morris Holds Modern Art Exhibition,” Yale News, 1936 reprinted in Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., “Notes and Footnotes on a Painting by George L. K. Morris,” University of New Mexico Art Museum Bulletin 10 (1976–77): 4. 28. In many of his compositions Morris incorporated pictographic forms and gridded compositions reminiscent of Torres-García’s style; this similarity may have resulted from Morris’ intimate familiarity with Torres-García’s work. Morris owned TorresGarcía’s Composition (plate 22) and displayed it prominently in his dining room for years. Thank you to Kinney Frelinghuysen for this information regarding Composition. 29. Morris’ first Indian subjects, dating to the late 1920s, are rendered in a stiff, figurative style that fits the stylized, narrative approach to these scenes of Indians hunting and fighting. These rigidly posed, doll-like figures have been linked to Morris’ studies in Paris with Fernand Léger and Léger’s European conceptions of primitive American subjects, as well as the likely influence of the posed illustrational style of the Pueblo watercolorists. Morris would have most likely seen the Society of Independent Artists shows and the 1931 Exposition of Tribal Arts. See Rushing, Avant-Garde, 90–96. 30. Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. estimates that Morris’ trip to Santa Fe must have occurred between 1932 and 1934. See Cikovsky, “Notes and Footnotes,” 10. Regarding his sources, Morris stated in 1975, “I spent some time in Santa Fe in the thirties, and explored the Indian pueblos between San Ildefenso and Acoma, all the while filling notebooks with sketches of design-fragments which interested me. However, I also origin stories S 85 noted the designs of Northwest Indians and even those (less sophisticated) in the East. I selected those which seemed to fit into the plastic scheme of the work on which I was engaged.” Letter to Van Deren Coke (noted art historian and director of the University Art Museum, Univ. of New Mexico), November 27, 1975, cited in Cikovsky, “Notes and Footnotes,” 6. 31. Indian Concretion was shown at the second annual American Abstract Artists exhibition in 1938. In addition to a preliminary color sketch and a lithograph, titled Indian Composition (1938), a smaller, preliminary version of Indian Concretion appears on the verso of Apparition (1951). My appreciation to Sean McCusker of the Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio for bringing these works to my attention. 32. There is a similar sketch of a bear claw in Morris’ uncatalogued sketchbooks, Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio, Lenox, MA. 33. Mari Carmen Ramírez notes the differences between the ahistorical primitivism of the Abstract Expressionists, aimed at the liberation of the psyche and prizing individual expression, and the archaic metaphysical intent inherent to Torres-García’s Constructive Universalism. Ramírez, El Taller Torres-García, 256. 34. Like Morris, Gottlieb was aware of Torres-García’s work in the Gallatin Collection. See Mary Davis MacNaughton, “Part II, The Pictographs, 1941–1953,” in Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective (New York: Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, 1981), 35, 51. Irving Sandler and Robert Pincus-Witten have argued that Gottlieb’s pictographs were influenced by Torres-García’s earlier use of the grid. See Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Praeger, 1970), 193; Pincus-Witten, “Exhibition at Royal Marks Gallery,” ArtForum 7 (Summer 1969), 61– 62. See also Mario H. Gradowczyk and Nelly Perazzo, Abstract Art from the Río de la Plata: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1933–1953 (New York: Americas Society, 2001), 68n157. 35. It is interesting to note that Gottlieb purchased a Chilkat blanket for his personal collection in the mid-1940s; the Newark Museum blanket bears a strong resemblance to the piece that was in Gottlieb’s collection. See MacNaughton, “Pictographs,” 37–38. Gottlieb painted The Mutable Objects in 1946, the same year that Barnett Newman organized the exhibition Northwest Coast Indian Painting at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City. 36. These traditional hand-carved and hand-painted totems served many functions but shared the basic function of telling a story through a series of vertically stacked abstract images. Both the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Museum began collecting and displaying Northwest Coast totems in the early twentieth century, and Gottlieb was one of many artists in New York frequenting these collections. 37. Travel to and study of the ancient sites of Pre-Columbian art continued to inform Matto’s art; in 1946 he visited Peru and Bolivia to study Pre-Columbian art along with Gonzalo Fonseca, Julio Alpuy, Sergio de Castro, and Jonio Montiel, all of the Taller Torres-García. In 1962, Matto’s collection became a public museum of Pre-Columbian art in Montevideo. 38. For several years Matto’s personal collection of Pre-Columbian art was housed in the same space as his studio, and within his collection were textiles with the same geometric llama motif. See Torres, “Pilgramaje,” 257–59. A similar gridlike matrix of lines is the basis for many of Matto’s abstract paintings, and given that many of the objects in his collection were textiles, the intersecting horizontal and vertical linear structure calls to 86 mind a close-up view of warp and weft—the basic structure of weaving. 39. Alicia Haber and Cecilia de Torres, Matto: El misterio de la forma, trans. Betty Tosso and Karla Podestá (Montevideo: Galería Oscar Prato, 2007), 196. 40. Alicia Haber discusses the cross-cultural associations that wood raises—primeval life, cycles of birth and growth, universality— as well as the spiritual associations of the vertical orientation of totems, which is the primary format of Matto’s later wood constructions and an important aspect of Nevelson’s works as well. See Haber, “Matto: In Quest of Essence,” in Matto: El misterio (see note 39), 199. See also Robert Hobbs, “Louise Nevelson: A Place That Is an Essence,” Woman’s Art Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1980): 41–42, regarding Nevelson’s ideas on the “livingness” of wood. 41. More often than not, Torres-García and his followers painted on cardboard, burlap sacking, or wooden packing crates— materials readily available at warehouses in Montevideo. The result of this was the suggestion of a rustic, uncultivated surface appearance that worked against European conceptions dividing fine art and craft traditions. “In the 1940s and ’50s Nevelson picked up wood scraps, old pieces of furniture, and remnants of turn-of the-century architecture . . . Later . . . she turned to blocks and dowels taken from lumberyards.” See Hobbs, “Louise Nevelson,” 42. Nevelson also acknowledged Torres-García as a source of inspiration, having seen his exhibitions at Rose Fried Gallery in the 1950s. Paternosto et al., Amerindian Paradigm, 94n195. 42. Thanks to Jay Grimm and Heather Palmer at PaceWildenstein for assistance on the subject of Nevelson’s intentions for installing this work. See also Michael Zakian, “Louise Nevelson,” in Beyond the Plane: American Constructions, 1930– 1965, ed. Jennifer Toher (Trenton: New Jersey State Museum, 1983), 79–82. 43. Wolfgang Paalen was a Surrealist artist, a collector of indigenous art, and the editor of the journal Dyn, published in Mexico City and distributed in New York, Paris, and London in the early 1940s. Will Barnet is an independent abstract artist who was associated with the Indian Space Painters. For a discussion of the Indian Space Painters, also heavily influenced by Northwest Coast designs, see Rushing, Avant-Garde, 137–56. 44. Nevelson’s earliest totemic vertical works were titled King and Queen, both of 1956; these appeared along with Personages at Sea and Indian Chief in a 1956 exhibition at Grand Central Moderns titled Royal Voyage. See Laurie Wilson’s discussion of Wolfgang Paalen’s writings on the totem in Wilson, Louise Nevelson: Iconography and Sources (New York: Garland, 1981), 194–97. 45. Josef Albers to Wassily Kandinsky, August 22, 1936, in Brenda Danilowitz, The Prints of Josef Albers: A Catalogue Raisonné 1915–1976 (New York: Hudson Hills, in association with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2001), 17. 46. The Alberses came to the United States fully immersed in the Arts and Crafts principles of the Bauhaus. Torres-García established the Asociación de Arte Constructivo and the Taller Torres-García along similar principles, embracing a wide range of art and handicrafts. See Jacqueline Barnitz, “An Arts and Crafts Workshop in Uruguay: El Taller Torres-García,” in El Taller Torres-García (see note 16), 139–42. 47. Brenda Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale (London: Phaidon, 2006), 132–33. 48. Albers’ sensitivity to materials is reflected in his choice of a wood-grain background to suggest the ripple effects of water, Tlaloc’s dominant attribute. As he explained, “To show wood merely as wood is a factual report. To make wood acting as water is an actual engagement.” Danilowitz, Prints of Josef Albers, 82. 49. See two drawings titled Linear Construction (1936) and the painting Marching X’s (1940), reproduced in Danilowitz and Liesbrock, Latin American Journeys, 100, 119. Danilowitz describes these early works as “invented geometry—silent, unsolvable visual puzzles that invite quiet contemplation . . . site plans for magical and imagined places” (93). 50. Between 1937 and 1964, Jonson and Albers maintained a lively correspondence; at least twenty-seven letters were exchanged. The letters convey a mutual respect and discuss an exhibition that Jonson helped coordinate for Albers at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe in 1942. Albers also gave Jonson one of his Graphic Tectonics prints. See correspondence files, Jonson Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. 51. Members of the Transcendental Painting Group (1938–40) included Emil Bisttram, Lawren Harris, Florence Miller Pierce, and Agnes Pelton, among others. A nonobjective painter deeply informed by Wassily Kandinsky, Jonson found in geometric form a mechanism for moving society forward. With his wife, Vera Jonson, he acquired a substantial collection of Pueblo pottery and textiles; these works were displayed in their home and are now part of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. 52. In the early 1930s Jonson produced another Native American themed series, titled Indian Design Motifs. See Rushing, AvantGarde, 80–85. 53. Albers studied Peruvian weaving techniques with Paul Klee at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, and in the United States she promoted hand-weaving techniques at Black Mountain and Yale. 54. The floating weft is an ancient Peruvian technique that Albers appreciated for its ability to bring pictorial elements into the woven field. 55. Albers often referred to architectural structures in her pictorial weavings, and in her writings she noted the parallels between the tectonic principles of Pre-Columbian architecture and weaving techniques. Architecture and weaving are both additive—constructing a whole from separate parts that retain their identity. See Anni Albers, “The Pliable Plane; Textiles in Architecture,” Perspecta 4 (1957): 36. 56. “In Peru, where no written language in the generally understood sense had developed even by the time of the conquest in the sixteenth century, we find—to my mind not in spite of this but because of it—one of the highest textile cultures we have come to know.” See Anni Albers, On Weaving (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1965), 68. 57. Oswald de Andrade’s 1924 publication Pau Brasil (Brazilwood) established an early precedent for using wood as a metonym for indigenous culture. See Barnitz, Art of Latin America, 59. Adele Nelson notes that the Tecelares series spans Pape’s involvement with both Concrete and Neo-Concrete artists groups in Rio—she is best known as a Neo-Concrete artist. The series dates from 1955 through 1960, and there is little stylistic change over the course of that time to suggest the transition from Concrete to Neo-Concrete concerns. Nelson suggests, “Pape may have intended to thwart the tracking of changes within the Tecelares series. She described herself as ‘intrinsically anarchistic’ and created a heterogeneous and at times sporadic oeuvre.” See Nelson, “Lygia Pape, Sem título (1959) and Sem título (1960),” in Geometry of Hope (see note 15), 169. 58. Lygia Pape, trans. Nadine Toppozada (Rio de Janeiro: Lacerda Editores, Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Secretaria Municipal de Cultura do Rio de Janeiro, 1998), 18. 59. See, for instance, Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1998). 60. On the problem of self-expression for minority artists at midcentury, see Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 58–77. 61. Herrera was the son of the Cochiti artist Tonita Peña, one of the original Pueblo watercolorists and the first Pueblo woman to become a professional artist. His abstract easel paintings represented a direct challenge to the Studio style, which had become the accepted convention for modern Indian art. 62. “I have to be careful . . . because I participate in a sacred society, I must respect certain limits about subject matter in art.” Joe H. Herrera, quoted in Rushing, “Authenticity and Subjectivity in Post-War Painting,” in Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century, ed. Margaret Archuleta and Rennard Strickland (Phoenix, AZ: Heard Museum, 1991), 19. 63. “As to color . . . I grew up in the Southwest where the colors in nature were pure and rampant and where my Indian neighbors and relatives used color to vibrate and shock in all its intensity with equal rampancy.” Leon Polk Smith, 1961, quoted in Leon Polk Smith (Grenoble, France: Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Musée de Grenoble, 1989), 91. Upon encountering Mondrian’s work in the Museum of Living Art in 1937, Smith became convinced of his own commitment to abstraction. When he received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1944, Smith traveled to New Mexico, where he spent much of his time looking at Native American art in galleries, at art fairs, and at pueblos. 64. Leon Polk Smith, quoted in Leon Polk Smith, 98. 65. Although the overt source for his tondo paintings of the early 1950s have machine-produced associations—baseballs and other sports balls—Smith provoked overlapping associations by giving these paintings tribal titles, such as Nowata, Chickasaw, and Okemah. See Randolph Lewis, “The Native Roots of Modern Art: Rereading the Paintings of Leon Polk Smith,” American Indian Quarterly 25, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 93–113. 66. If one looks at maps of Oklahoma from the early twentieth century, the blocking out of “Five Tribes” territories is strikingly similar. Another early painting, Pointed Accents #1, supports the idea that Smith sustained Native American themes throughout his production. As in OK Territory, Pointed Accents #1 would appear to be nonobjective abstraction, except for the notation that Smith hand-wrote on the verso of this canvas— “after Indian sand painting, 1944.” In large-scale abstractions from the 1980s, such as Arrangement in Black and Red, the pattern of triangular forms is an enlarged, consolidated version of the triangular pattern of Pointed Accents. 67. Torres-García, “The New Art of America” (see note 16), 75. origin stories S 87