American Indian influence on abstract art

(ca. 1930–present) North American, Mesoamerican, South American Andean cultures
Abstract art consists of works that are not subject to the limits imposed by representation. The emphasis in abstract art is on form rather than subject matter. Some abstract designs have no recognizable subject matter. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, pre-Columbian and post-Columbian abstract art that is indigenous to the Americas served as inspiration for the modern American abstract art movement. This reversed the stance of early ethnographers who had termed American Indian art primitive, often because the works were executed on buildings, pottery vessels, clothing, and textiles, rather than on canvas or in marble as was done in the European tradition.
Modern ethnologists and art historians, reflecting on the major artistic contributions of American Indians from the Arctic Circle to South America, now view these indigenous abstractions as both powerful and sophisticated. The split depiction of animals made by artisans of the Tsimshian tribe living on the coast of what is now British Columbia is one example frequently cited. These works were collected and written about by anthropologist Franz Boas. Another example is the progressively abstracted depiction of birds and animals in Mesoamerican glylphic writing and patterned textiles produced by the Aztec, whose civilization arose in Mesoamerica about A.D. 1100. The Maya, who also
lived in Mesoamerica starting in about 1500 B.C., produced abstract textile designs, as did the Inca Empire that was established in what is now Peru in about A.D. 1000. The mounds built by the Adena and Hopewell cultures that occupied the Mississippi River Valley of what is now the United States from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 200 and 300 B.C. to A.D. 1250, respectively, are huge abstractions. The Nazca Lines, huge designs made in the earth of the Ingenio Valley in what is now Peru, are also examples of abstraction on an enormous scale. The Nazca culture flourished starting about 600 B.C.
For American Indian artists, as for modern abstract artists, even the simplest designs, such as stripes or a series of triangles, had meaning. Their designs are what modern art critics call “visual syntax”—literally, a language of design. “The fundamental unity of the metaphors that inform the arts of all these non-Western cultures—The ‘archaic,’ as well as the ‘tribal’—essentially manifests itself in the shaping of symbols, monuments, ritual paraphernalia, and semantic signs that were widely absorbed by the societies,” writes art theorist Cesar Paternosto in The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art.
Non-Indian artists first turned their attention to these works by Indians in the early 1930s. Art historian and abstract painter Barnett Newman believed so much in the power of these abstract metaphors that by 1945, in an article he wrote comparing two artists who were painting in Paris, he said, “They have roots deep in the tradition of our American aborigines” and added that “only by this kind of contribution is there any hope for the possible development of a truly American art.” Adolph Gottlieb, who painted a series of pictographs based on artistic concepts that he learned from textiles and paintings made by indigenous people living along the Pacific Northwest Coast, cosigned a letter to the New York Times in 1943. Along with Newman and fellow artist Mark Rothko, he publicly claimed “spiritual kinship with primitives and archaic art.” In 1946 Newman organized an exhibit of paintings by Indians of the Northwest at a prestigious art gallery. Many of these paintings had come from the American Museum of Natural History. Newman said that the move had declassified the pieces as scientific specimens and reclassified them as art.
Sculptor John Storrs, who made towerlike structures of stone and metal, based his designs on some of the patterns of the Navajo (Dineh) rugs that he collected. Sculptors Henry Moore and Josef Albers incorporated indigenous Mesoamerican designs into their works. Painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who lived in New York City in the 1940s, wrote that he had an inner vibration comparable to American Indian art and acknowledged that prehistoric American cave painting and rock art had inspired his own works. Painter Jackson Pollock, who grew up in the West, was knowledgeable about American Indian art and borrowed themes from indigenous artifacts during the early part of his career.