John Graham: Artist and Avatar exhibition records

John Graham, a painter, collector, and writer who has often been overlooked as an artist, influenced abstract expressionism. Documentation on his early life remains scarce and contradictory. Published sources have widely cited his birthplace as Kiev, Ukraine, but baptismal records indicate that Graham was born Ivan Dombrowski into a noble family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1886 (1887 in the Gregorian calendar). He spent his youth in Kiev, graduating from the University of Kiev in 1907. In World War I he served as a Calvary officer for the Russian Army and was also an officer for the “Whites” or Anti-Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. After immigrating to New York City in late 1920 to escape persecution, Dombrowski immersed himself in the local art scene, and ultimately changed his name to John D. Graham. He was known for his extravagant claims, some of which included that he had shared a prison cell with Tsar Nicholas II and that he was the son of the Roman God Jupiter. Graham’s greatest influence in the world of art are perhaps his portraits of cross-eyed women, and his 1937 essay Systems and Dialetics of Art, which had a major influence on Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other abstract expressionist artists. Among his major patrons were Duncan Phillips, who in 1929 gave Graham his first solo museum exhibition, and Katherine Dreier. Graham died in London in 1961.

John Graham: Artist and Avatar was the first major retrospective on Graham’s work. The exhibition came about when an anonymous donor contributed money to conserve and exhibit Graham’s work, with additional support for the exhibition and accompanying catalogue made possible through the National Endowment for the Arts. The exhibit was held at The Phillips Collection from July 9 to September 4, 1988.