JOHN D. GRAHAM | UNTITLED

The Gilbert Jonas Collection, 

Guernsey's, New Windsor, The Gilbert Jonas Collection, Lot 150

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

“During [the 1930s], vanguard artists organized themselves into groups such as the American Abstract Artists and The Ten. A number, including Graham, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and, to a lesser degree, David Smith (who did not get along with Gorky but saw Graham frequently), also constituted a group but in the loosest sense of that word. They met at each other’s homes and studios and in various Greenwich Village hangouts, casually, although often enough to keep track of each other’s thinking. There was no leader; Davis was the best known, but Graham was the greater intellectual force. His status was enhanced by his variegated activities as painter, connoisseur, polemicist, cosmopolite and dandy.

An ex-officer in the Tsarist cavalry and counter-revolutionary who escaped to America in 1920 after the Bolsheviks took power, he later turned pro-Soviet (during the time when Communism was in vogue among intellectuals), while remaining an aristocrat… Graham made frequent trips to Paris and gained a reputation there as a painter, exhibiting at the Zborowski Gallery in 1928 and 1929; Waldemar George wrote a monograph about his work, and André Salmon, a eulogistic catalog introduction. His shows abroad and the critical coverage they received helped impress his friends in New York. Here, he became well known as an artist (he was given shows at Duncan Phillips’ Gallery, Washington, D. C., in 1929, and at the Dudensing Gallery, New York, in 1929, 1930 and 1931) and as a connoisseur (he selected the Frank Crowninshield collection of African art).

Graham defined art as ‘a creative process of abstracting.’ He believed that art should reveal the essence of things, and therefore should be abstracted from nature—figurative like Picasso’s. However, this revelation could not be achieved through copying visual reality but only through ‘the evaluation of form, perfectly understood,’ the creation of perfect, self-sufficient compositions of flat forms. To Graham, such painting was radical: ‘Revolution is the repudiation of traditional forms outgrown. Revolution is the change of methods and not of the subject matter. The change of methods means the change of forms.’ He added that a change of subject matter could not be radical, for ‘if nothing else, it is too easy.’ The material flatness of the picture plane was so important to Graham that he disparaged the Renaissance as ‘the period of the greatest decadence in art’ (although that did not prevent him from adulating Uccello and other old masters). Painting at its highest and most difficult had to be ‘planimetric,’ which, as he defined it, ‘is essentially a two-dimensional painting. It can be three-dimensional in so far as detail modeling is concerned but remains within the plane neither protruding nor receding.’

Graham, who joined The Ten in 1939, probably helped direct the attention of Rothko and Gottlieb, two of the group’s founders, to Jung’s theories, and to reinforce their earlier interest in primitive art. In the early forties, Gottlieb and Rothko began to paint pictures whose themes, they said, were concerned with primitive myths and symbols that continue to have meaning today. 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.”

(Irving Sandler, “John D. Graham: The Painter as Esthetician and Connoisseur, Artforum, October 1968, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 50-53)