John Graham was a Russian-born painter whose work as an organizer and writer helped bring widespread recognition to the New York School. His style was influenced by his acquaintances among the European avant-garde. He also embraced Surrealism, especially the dreamlike mystery and strange juxtaposition of objects characteristic of Giorgio de Chirico, and later the flattened forms and multiple vantage points of Cubism, drawing most heavily from the compositions of Picasso. Graham did not develop a signature style until he rejected modernism in the early 1940s; for the remaining twenty years of his career, Graham drew inspiration from Renaissance art and became devoted to painting realistic - though highly expressive - portraits of women. However, Graham's legacy within the New York School extends beyond his work as a painter. His lasting influence was in transmitting progressive ideas to younger artists in his circle and in his close friendship and role as mentor to painters like Willem de Kooning. As an early proponent of Surrealist techniques, like automatic writing, and his use of analytic Cubism's reduction of images to two-dimensional forms, his influence laid the groundwork for the development of Abstract Expressionism.

• 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 d'Art, 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 York's 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.
• Graham's 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.

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. George's 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.

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 mother's 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.

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 the biomorphic forms and dreamlike imagery of Surrealists like Ernst and de Chirico - Graham became a central figure in the development of the New York School. His firm grasp of European modernism is evident in his paintings from the late 1920s, which show mysterious settings characteristic of de Chirico. Later, Graham became interested in the analytic Cubism of Picasso, as he began to flatten his own compositional space into arrangements of interlocking geometric shapes. In the early 1930s, Graham initiated friendships with Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, to whom he communicated his own theories on the techniques and concepts of abstraction.

Graham divorced again in 1934 and married for a third time in 1936. Due to dire financial circumstances at the end of the 1930s, he spent some time living in Mexico. Graham supplemented his income as a Paris buyer of African art - primarily sculpture - on behalf of New York dealers, in the process becoming fascinated with this genre and its relationship to modernism. Like many contemporary thinkers, he saw an affinity between the sharp, abstract edges of African sculpture and the shapes of Cubism, an observation that became the basis for his widely read paper, "Primitive Art and Picasso," (1937) in which he championed the ability of Picasso to reveal the inner truth of objects with the same facility as "primitive" artists. That same year Graham also published the volume System and Dialectics of Art, which helped to define the nature of abstract painting and proved enormously influential during the following decade. In it, Graham praised abstraction for its ability to transform objects and create new meaning and to express the unconscious. It also established painting as a creative process, or journey, an idea that became the foundation for Harold Rosenberg's concept of action painting.

While his own painting continued to garner critical attention, Graham became more influential as an organizer who brought the work of the New York School artists to a wider audience of connoisseurs and critics. He curated a show at McMillen Gallery in 1942 called French and American Painters that presented the work of artists like Picasso and Braque alongside the work of younger American painters, providing a stamp of legitimacy for newcomers like Pollock and de Kooning. In fact, the exhibition was the first ever for Pollock, and only the second for de Kooning. This exposure was a pivotal point both for them and for American painting as a whole. Graham continued to organize significant New York School exhibitions during the 1940s.

In his own work, in the 1940s Graham made a radical reversion to realism, and devoted the remainder of his career to portraits of women. The reasons for this were not external, though Graham was involved in a painful divorce at the time. His decision was a conscious break from the mainstream and coincident with an increased interest in Renaissance painting and mysticism; around this time he began signing his works "Ioannus Magus" and "Ioannus San Germanus" after the supposedly immortal occult figure Count St. Germain. These actions can be considered a final part of his deliberate development of a personal legend since moving to America decades before. These works, traditional in comparison to the abstractions of his friends, occupied him for the remainder of his life. Graham's move towards realism was not critically popular, and was seen as a repudiation of his former position. Consequently, his work fell out of fashion. Graham also explicitly turned his back on Picasso during this period, calling him repetitive and one-dimensional in his cantankerous essay "The Case of Mr. Picasso" (1946).

Graham divorced for a third time and later lived with Marianne Strate. (Strate's daughter, Ileana Sonnabend, became a major New York art dealer and wife of Leo Castelli.) Graham never fully recovered after Strate's death in 1955. With his career as a prolific painter largely at an end, Graham moved to Paris in 1959, never to return to the United States, and died in London in 1961.

Graham's considerable impact on Abstract Expressionism was due largely to his role as intercessor between the European avant-garde and the budding American art scene. His writing on art theory proved influential on not only the New York School, but also to later movements like Minimalism.


Below are John Graham's major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.



Abstract painting is the highest and most difficult form of painting because it requires of the artist the ability to take full stock of reality and the ability to make a departure from it. (System and Dialectics of Art, 1937)

"Graham was very important and he discovered Pollock. I make that very clear. It wasn't anybody else, you know." (Willem de Kooning on Graham; De Kooning on Pollock, An Interview)