John Graham the painter was enjoying a moment of post-war re-discovery in 1946, with work on view at two solo exhibitions in New York, and at Betty Parsons Gallery’s inaugural exhibition. He was rediscovering classical figuration and producing his signature cross-eyed women haunted by geometric figures that would remain his legacy as a painter.1 But John Graham the connoisseur, was bent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and he took the occasion of one of these three exhibition receptions to self-publish a screed against the man who rankled him most: Pablo Picasso. Because:
“His fame is a great international, money-making intrigue. His art is a hoax. His artist-followers will defend him to the last not because they believe in him but because without him they have not got commercially a leg to stand on.”2
Never mind that up until a few months before running this type-written manuscript through a mimeograph, Graham was among Picasso’s most vocal “artist-followers.” He had recovered entirely from that thrall, and continued merrily that “as long as we have cafeterias, tri-borough bridges, iceboxes, and gas, we really don’t need Picassos.”3
For the record, 1946 New Yorkers had all of these in abundance, and still Picasso was in hot demand: John Graham’s The Case of Mr. Picasso was an attempt at social suicide. Graham was a painter of some renown, but as a champion and mentor of the rising generation of Abstract Expressionists, he was a giant. Why take this moment of professional achievement—an opening reception in his own honor—and give it over to attack the globe’s favorite living painter?
That’s what Barnett Newman asked Graham at the opening. Newman looked up to Graham, as did Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko.4 Betty Parsons developed her stable with Graham’s consultation, building out a roster of Abstract Expressionist masters. Newman hadn’t yet had his own ground-breaking first exhibition, but he saw Graham’s efforts for what they were and tried to convince him to stifle them. Graham thought Newman was the future—one of the reasons he turned on Picasso—and he begrudgingly ceded to the younger painter’s advice. In a rare case of restraint, he packed up the copies of The Case of Mr. Picasso into a big box and nudged them behind the reception desk.
After a few days of cooling off, Graham took the box to the post office and mailed them out to everyone he knew.
II. John Graham, Picasso-ite Painter.
Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowsky was born in Kyiv in about 1886. Dombrowsky changed his story and his name several times—to avoid or to join certain wars and Bolshevik prison camps—so it’s hard to know for sure when he was born or who he thought he was going to be. But like his father, he trained as a lawyer, and he appears to have got by on his exotic backstory and superabundance of charm until settling in New York in the 1920s. There he thought he’d try his hand at painting, and he went to the place you go when you think you might: the Art Students League of New York. He studied with John Sloan and soon became his teaching assistant—other painters recalled him as the most talented and unorthodox in the class:
“I also went in the evening to John Sloan’s class, where my best friend was the monitor John Debrowsky . . . Debrowsky first attracted my attention by drawing a nude with two pencils, one red and one black, and starting at the feet and running right up.”5
That’s Alexander Calder’s recollection, and Graham’s idiosyncratic approach to the human form would be a through-line in his career. Sloan bought Graham’s work and helped him connect to Dudensing and Weyhe Galleries, Stuart Davis with whom Sloan had worked years prior on The Masses, and to Duncan Phillips, he of the eponymous Washington D.C. collection. After a detour through Baltimore, Graham found himself in Paris on Phillips’ dime, his studio down the street from Davis’, and soaking up Picasso, Matisse, and everything else good about Paris in the interwar years. Along the way, he changed his name to John Graham, loved and left five wives (again, the exact number is open to dispute), and confirmed himself as among the most tasteful of an international community of artist-connoisseurs.
In 1942, Graham took time out from divorcing his fourth wife to curate an exhibition of French and American painters. He included Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, where they met for the first time; old friend Stuart Davis and and Willem de Kooning; he showed them alongside the international heavyweights, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Bonnard, and Modigliani.
The repercussions of this sort of work are hard to overstate. Certainly the meaning of consolidating America’s new generation of painters under the legitimacy of the European masters was years ahead of any museum—and by most measures, that gesture alone is more impactful than Graham’s lovely and bizarre work as a painter.
But wife number five took that impact even further.
III. John Graham, Kingmaker.
Whatever Graham had against Picasso is secondary to the influence he exuded on a new generation of dealers. In the early 1940s, Graham met Marianne Strate through Hedda Sterne at Parsons’ studio. Strate was married and so was Graham, but that never stopped Graham. It’s not clear that they were ever legally married, but he later referred to Marianne as his fifth wife, and they traveled to Europe and enjoyed a life of fine thoughts and fine friends and fine paintings and many other fine things, living for big chunks of time with Marianne’s daughter and her husband out in East Hampton. Nice work if you can get it, and Marianne’s son-in-law was looking for something of his own. Leo Castelli was then middle-management in the family clothing business, but he got the bug from Graham: there’s something exciting happening in downtown New York.
By the end of end of the decade, Castelli was one of two non-artist members of “The Club,” the informal group of artists that incubated Abstract Expressionism. Castelli first dabbled in selling privately the European modernists that Graham had paired with the AbEx painters in 1942, but when he started his own gallery, in 1957, it was a stronghold of the new American generation. In 1959, Castelli’s wife Ileana, left him, but don’t cry—they remained friends, and after taking a new husband, Ileana Sonnabend launched her own galleries, first in Paris and then in New York, showing newcomers Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
IV. And Beyond.
It’s not just a pivot point in the twentieth century, from pre-war modernism to post-war Abstract Expressionism—that legacy of influence keeps giving. Sonnabend showed a young Jeff Koons, and Castelli is at least in part responsible for unleashing upon the world the force that is Larry Gagosian. The young Los Angeleno latched onto the elder statesman in the 1980s. Gagosian brought Castelli’s connoisseurship to his West Coast clientele. “I’m a very bad salesman and Larry is a very good salesman,” Castelli delicately put it.6 In the warp and weave of the life of modern painting, you have John Graham to thank for a small but important piece of the art world today.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Irving Sandler’s appraisal of Graham’s career: “His paintings after 1943 . . . are so highly personal, felt and masterly as to deserve evaluation on their own merits, apart from the rise and fall of artistic manners.” (ArtForum, 1968).
As quoted in John Graham: Maverick Modernist, Alicia G. Longwell, Karen Wilkin and William C. Agee, p. 162.
Ibid., p. 162.
Irving Sandler put it this way in his 1968 Artforum profile on Graham: “Graham’s influence in this direction was probably strongest on Pollock. Most acquaintances of both men have recalled that Pollock at some point during the late thirties read Graham’s article, titled “Primitive Art and Picasso,” which appeared in the Magazine of Art, April, 1937, and was so impressed by it that he searched out the author. The essay anticipates to a degree Pollock’s subsequent artistic evolution.”
Longwell., p. 145.
As quoted in the must-read profile on Gagosian by Patrick Radden Keeffe in the July 24, 2023 issue of the New Yorker.