John D. Graham


John D. Graham was a Russian Empire-born American Modernist / figurative painter, collector and mentor of modernist artists in New York City.
Born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowsky in Kiev, Russian Empire into an aristocratic family, he studied law before serving as a cavalry officer in World War I. He was briefly imprisoned after the Bolsheviks came to power in 1918 in the Russian Revolution, and fled to Warsaw, returning to fight with "the Whites". After the resistance collapsed, in 1920 he immigrated to the United States with his second wife. He soon adopted John as the English version of his first name, and took John D. Graham as his legal name when he became a US citizen in 1927.
He studied painting for the first time in his 30s, becoming deeply interested in modernism. In addition to gaining attention for his own work, he championed the new movement as a collector and curator. He was a mentor to a younger generation of American artists, who developed the style of Abstract Expressionism in the New York area. In the 1940s and 1950s, Graham developed a new figurative style derived from classical masters, which he first showed in paintings and drawings of Russian soldiers. He died in London, England.

Military career

Born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrovsky into the aristocratic class, with parents of Polish and Russian descent, he received a classical education and later attended law school. He served as a cavalry officer in the Circassian Regiment of the Russian Imperial army. During World War I, he earned the Saint George's Cross.
After the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, Dombrovsky was briefly imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary, because of his class. He fled for a time to his mother's native Poland, which gained independence for a time after WWI.. There he lived in Warsaw. He returned to fight in the Crimea with "the Whites", counter-revolutionaries, but decided to leave when the resistance collapgsed.

Immigration to the United States

In 1920, Dombrovsky immigrated to the United States with his second wife, Vera, and their son Nicholas. They settled in New York City. He began calling himself John in the US, and had his name officially changed to John D. Graham upon becoming a United States citizen in 1927.

Artistic career

Still under the name Dombrovsky, John began to study painting for the first time at the Art Students League of New York. There he also briefly assisted painter John F. Sloan, known as one of the Ashcan School. Dabrowsky soon attracted attention for his art.
In 1925 he relocated to Baltimore with his third wife, artist Elinor Gibson. They had a son David Graham. The son later married Patricia Thompson, and died before his father in Windermere, Florida. Patricia Thompson Graham later gave numerous works by his father to MOMA in New York. Other of Graham's relatively small collection of remaining works are in her sisters Kathryn and Jean's portfolios.
While in Baltimore, Graham joined a group called The Modernists. He served as their secretary and exhibited in their gallery. In this period, in addition to painting, Graham established himself as an art connoisseur and collector. He was greatly interested in developing knowledge of advances and changes in the art world, and kept in touch with what was taking place in Europe as well as the US.
Beginning in the 1930s, Graham became associated with the New York School as an artist and impresario. In that decade, he was painting in the abstract, post-cubist style of Pablo Picasso, who exerted wide leadership from Paris. Graham was a close friend with artists Wilhelmina Weber Furlong and her husband Thomas Furlong of the Art Students League.
Graham and Elinor Gibson were divorced in 1934, and she kept custody of their son David.
That year Graham met American Constance Wellman in Paris; they married in New York City in 1936 and lived in Brooklyn Heights. They were near other artists Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, and Dorothy Dehner. Graham worked for Hilla Rebay, helping her found the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which developed as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Along with many others, Graham and his wife struggled financially during the Great Depression. They moved to Mexico for its lower cost of living, and continued to live there on and off. Graham and Constance Wellman divorced after the end of World War II, on July 16, 1945.
During the 1940s Graham married for the fifth time, to Marianne Schapira. She had a grown daughter, Ileana Sonnabend, who was then married to Leo Castelli. They both became influential in the New York art world and were known as independent gallery owners and dealers.
Graham served as a mentor to younger artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky. He introduced Ileana and Leo Castelli to his artist friends in the New York art world. He was also considered influential to Lee Krasner, David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, and Mark Rothko. Graham claimed to have befriended Picasso and many other important European modernists while living in Paris and in Russia. He often entertained and lectured the younger American artists in New York City about modernist ideas. He was frequently the bearer of radical new insights into art and creativity.
In 1942 Graham curated a group show at the McMillan Gallery that exhibited work by Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Stuart Davis. He showed them with work by well-established European artists: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Pierre Bonnard, and Amedeo Modigliani.
Along with Stuart Davis and Hans Hofmann, Graham is considered a mentor for the younger American artists above, who comprised many of the Abstract expressionist generation of American painters and sculptors. He was the author of System and Dialectics of Art, a treatise on art, modernism and the avant-garde. It was an enormously influential text during the 1940s and supported the modernist movement.
During this period and into the 1950s, Graham also continued to paint, developing a "unique figurative style" derived from classical forms; he was especially influenced by the works of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolas Poussin, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. He signed these paintings with "Ioannus", the Latin form of John and Ivan. Among his first works in this style were paintings and drawings of Russian soldiers completed about 1943, drawn from his own experience in the imperial army during World War I.
Graham died in London in 1961.
After his death, Graham's art of his last two decades was the subject of increasing scholarly and market interest. In 1968, MOMA circulated a traveling exhibition of his works from this period, John D. Graham/Paintings and Drawings.