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John D Graham — Biography
| 1881 |
Born in Kiev, Ukraine |
| 1961 |
Died |
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John Graham 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. |
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