ARTIST OVERVIEW
John Graham (1886-1961) was a seminal figure in the development of the American avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s. A brilliant intellectual, raconteur, and eccentric, his art and connoisseurship were instrumental in bringing European modernism to America, and his support for younger artist friends such as David Smith, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock was a critical component in the development of abstract expressionism. His 1937 book, System and Dialectics of Art, prefigured abstract expressionism's development, writing that "painting is essentially an abstract process…great works of art stir one…not by literary means, but by velocity of brush, intensity of drawing, precision of form, vibration of surfaces.” Later in his career, in the 1950s, Graham proved to also be a highly influential and innovative artist as he reexamined the concept of figure painting and infused it with a thoroughly vanguard sensibility.
The son of Polish aristocrats, Graham was born Ivan Dombrowski in Kiev, Russia. He came to the United States in 1920 after the Russian Revolution, in which he fought on behalf of the Russian czar, and changed his name upon arrival. In 1923, he commenced studies with John Sloan at the Art Student's League. A few years later he met Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., who became an important patron and who granted him his first solo museum show in 1929. Graham was famous in artistic circles for his colorful idiosyncrasies and flamboyant personality. He fashioned himself as deposed nobility and claimed close ties to Russian royalty.
As an artist, Graham is prized for the unexpected juxtapositions of form and content in his work, and its employment of free association. As a scholar, he possessed an extraordinary knowledge of art history and looked back to Greco-Roman antiquities and the Old Masters, specifically the Italian Renaissance painters, for inspiration. A strong believer in the occult, Graham believed art should embody and convey the mystical, and he delighted in creating imagery that challenged the viewer. His primary objective was to formulate what he called an evocative art, one that was, by definition, an enigma.
John Graham's art, like his life, was allusive. He mused over unexpected juxtapositions of form and content and found power in the kind of cryptic iconography that resonates throughout his works. His painted portraits and drawings of male and female heads speak today with the same immediacy and disturbing beauty as in Graham's lifetime, and evidence Graham's powerful influence on early works by Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky. Likewise, Graham's paintings of Russian soldiers military regalia, and horses remain highly sought-after today for their sophisticated and cryptic iconography and formal virtuosity.
John Graham's work is held in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Phillips Collection and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
