Important Emerging Interests in Classical Texts
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* Graham traveled to Europe frequently and was personally associated with members of the French avant-garde between the World Wars; he helped to spread Surrealist techniques, like automatic writing, to young American painters, including Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky. Additionally, Graham brought back copies of Parisian journals like Cahiers dArt, which provided American artists their first glimpse of the groundbreaking Cubist work of their European contemporaries.
* Graham was interested in African art and its connection to modern painting, especially Cubism. Graham believed that so-called “primitive” art – especially African sculpture -was free from the traditional constraints of Western art history, and through its abstraction of the forms of the natural world it revealed the “inner truth” of its subject. Graham thought that abstract painting could achieve the same expressive effect, and believed that the work of Pablo Picasso best embodied this concept; he published an influential essay called “Primitive Art and Picasso” articulating this belief in 1937.
* Graham organized a major exhibition in 1942 at New Yorks McMillen Gallery called French and American Painters; this landmark show provided the first public exposure for Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who became the most influential painters of the New York School.
*Grahams own painting was overshadowed by his work as an organizer and as a writer. His 1937 work System and Dialectics of Art defined his theory on abstract painting and proved enormously influential on the budding painters of the New York School.
DETAILED VIEW:
Early Life
John Graham was born Ivan Gratianovich Dombrowsky in Kiev, Ukraine, to parents of minor Polish nobility. The date of his birth is disputed, though usually cited as anywhere between 1886 and 1888. After studying law, he became a cavalry officer during the First World War, winning a St. Georges Cross for bravery. After the war, he supported the tsarist White Army and was consequently imprisoned by the victorious Reds. Upon his release in 1920, he emigrated to the United States with his wife and child.
Early Training
When Graham arrived in New York in 1920, he adopted the anglicized first name John, and legally changed his full name in 1927 when he became a U.S. citizen, later explaining that “Graham” resembled his mothers name in Cyrillic. Graham had moved in artistic circles in tsarist Russia; he had seen the major collections of modern art assembled by fellow aristocrats, and was therefore familiar with painters like Malevich and Kandinsky. With this background, Graham quickly became involved in the New York art world shortly after his arrival. Graham combined his outgoing personality and the noble swagger of a cavalry officer with a proclivity for exaggeration, and he easily made friends and found followers. He studied under Ash Can painter John Sloan at the Art Students League, where Graham befriended classmates and future Abstract Expressionists Adolph Gottlieb, Alexander Calder and David Smith. Graham divorced and remarried in the mid-1920s, and for a time lived in Baltimore. At this point in his career, he was still influenced by Cézanne, as revealed in his muted palette and concentration on still life arrangements. Nevertheless, Graham was consciously moving away from realism. In response to Cubist conceptions of geometrically defined composition, Graham began to attenuate and flatten his objects within the space of the canvas. He also began to use larger areas of single colors and to extend the foreground of the composition to the very edge of the picture plane, eliminating the illusion of depth.
Graham began to exhibit frequently in the second half of the 1920s, with shows at Society of Independent Artists, Dudensing Gallery and others in New York, and also in Paris. His paintings were also included in the inaugural Whitney Biennial in 1932.
Mature Period
Graham traveled frequently between Europe and the U.S., and his meetings with artists and intellectuals in Paris established him as a vital stateside conduit for the progressive theories of the European avant-garde. Assimilating the styles he observed in Europe into his work -most importantly the Cubist constructions of Picasso and Braque, and