MIRROR MIRROR ON THE EASEL

who is the fairest painter since Medieval?.” I’m maybe not as good as Raphael”, he once conceded, ”but there is more tension in my canvases”. One of the greatest admirers of his own haunting portraits was the eccentric Russian called John Graham. In the case of John Graham even more than with most painters, it is difficult to separate the artist from his art; in fact, there are those who believe that he deliberately tried to shape his life, or at least his legend, into a conscious work of art that would demonstrate his concept of ”hermetically sealed purity”. The challenge is to disentangle the brilliance from the bragadoccio.

John Graham

John Graham

Graham was one of those true exotics that periodically flash through an epoch, calling attention to themselves by their very strangeness. Born in Russia in 1881 of an aristocratic family named Dambrowsky, he studied law before accepting a commission in the Czar’s cavalry. As an aide-de-camp to Emperor Nicholas II, he thrice received the St. George Cross. Arrested and condemned to death by the Bolsheviks, he later claimed that one of his captors arranged his escape to Paris after being impressed by his artistic talent.

Sometime in the twenties he arrived in this country, took Graham as his name, married an American, and was naturalized,although to the end he remained very much the cosmopolitan Russian aristocrat in exile. After studying with John Sloan at the Art Students League, Graham soon began to function as a link between the Parisian avant-garde he had come to know and promising American artists like Gorky, De Kooning, Pollock and David Smith. Graham claimed that he brought to the New York ”provinces” a sophistication and original turn of mind that was sadly missing from the scene.”In 1937 Graham authored an influential Socratic dialogue entitled System and Dialectics in Art. Graham’s book, which expressed his preoccupation with symbolism and outward manifestations of a primitive subconscious, attracted the attention and admiration of Jackson Pollock and other artists who would soon be associated with Abstract Expressionism. ”

John Graham

John Graham

The gift was reciprocal. From his associates, particularly De Kooning, he borrowed elements of style and treatment for his own painting, eventually attaining a substantial underground reputation since Graham seldom exhibited. By the 1940’s however, he had renounced modernism and denounced Picasso, who he decided, was ”grinding out merchandise”. Knowledge is the only approach to the divinity of art, he wrote in a mystical monograph published posthumously; ”This heroic task is not for the feeble-minded, soft, scheming, petti-foggers, double dealers, and scavengers”. He also likened abstract art to the making of refrigerators.”

For himself, Graham turned back to the classicists for inspiration, artists like Leonardo, Raphael, Cellini, Donatello, and Ingres. The result is a small but haunting group of paintings and oil drawings, their intensity heightened by figures in majestic poses, elegant draftmanship, and an unorthodox use of color. He also frequently embellished his pictures with astro-symbols and calligraphy, usually in Greek. He was alleged to be fluent in twelve languages. His later portraits, of enigmatic beauties with ”one wandering eye” , were often disfigured with slashed necks and wrists. ”Human blood”, he wrote, ”is beauty integral”.

John Graham

John Graham

Graham’s mysterious body of work, offers some proof, perhaps ample proof, that his work should be taken seriously, if not necessarily at his own estimate. ” I think perhaps”, he confided shortly before his death in 1961, ”that I am probably the best painter in the world.”

”He was, too, the kind of European scoundrel that transplants so well in American soil, being as pragmatic as he was magnetic and all but omniscient on the subjects of art and culture…. born in Warsaw, was 34 years old when he came here in 1920, trailing clouds of aristocracy, myth and deception. He departed in 1961, to die the same year in London, having exerted an influence on the scene that was out of all proportion to the quality of his own art. …

It used to be a joke that all White Russian emigres were Romanovs. Except when claiming to be Jupiter’s son, brought to earth by an eagle and deposited on a rock in the Black Sea, Graham remained more or less faithful to his ancestry, which was Polish on his father’s side and German on his mother’s. All the same, he told of having shared a tutor with Nicholas II (who was 20 years his senior) and later on, his cell…He served as a cavalry officer in World War I, fighting against Rumania, but claimed also to hav

rticipated in pogroms and liked to demonstrate how to lop heads off without dismounting.

John Graham (American, born in Ukraine, 1881–1961) Celia, ca. 1944, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

John Graham (American, born in Ukraine, 1881–1961) Celia, ca. 1944, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The curator pulls no punches in her essay, covering the arrogance that enabled Graham to hurt his friends as easily as he charmed them, his womanizing, opportunism and other frailties. But by also conveying his extraordinary intelligence and even more extraordinary eye for art, as well as his attractive physical presence, she succeeds in making the legend credible. Outstanding among the patrons of art that Graham affected are Duncan Phillips, who supported him for some years, and the then-editor of Vanity Fair, Frank Crowninshield, who commissioned him to assemble a collection of African art. Commenting on this subject in his ”Systems and Dialectics of Art” (1937), the artist reveals in a few pages a depth of understanding that would require an entire volume to express today. As a writer, Graham is Ad Reinhardt without the humor, which may account for his effect on artists such … Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning (who has confirmed that Graham alone was the discoverer of Pollock)….

They may indeed denote his disillusionment with Modernism and a nose put out of joint by the arrival of the World War II emigres bringing news of Surrealism. Even so, they are the first paintings to reflect no one but Graham and the obsession with enigma, the occult and other un-American esoterica that propelled him. …The curator may go too far in making Graham a prophet of Serialism and other trends. But there’s no denying that the present cult of individualism makes it a good time to upgrade him from fascinating failure to highly original artist.” ( Vivien Raynor, New York Times )

Graham’s  portrayal of the female figure can be disturbing, quite the opposite of sensual. Graham’s portraits exist between the poetic ambivalence of eroticism and a sense of enigmatic mystery;two elements which derive from his personal life as well as his intense interest in esoteric philosophies, i.e.: mythology, occult literature, alchemy, Jungian psychology, and many forms of yoga and meditation. Ultimately, a man whose ideas and intelligence had great significance in broadening possibilities for his contemporaries.

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