John Grahm Painting of Seatedwoman in White Dress
Art: John Graham, A Brilliant Scoundrel
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July 3, 1987
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THE title of his retrospective at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y., proclaims John Graham an avatar -tongue in cheek, no doubt, for the artist was more scoundrel than incarnation of a god. 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.
Graham, whose original name was Ivan Dombrowski and who was born in Warsaw, was 34 years old when he came here in 1920, trailing clouds of aristocracy, myth and deception. He departed in 1941, 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. So it's very much to the credit of Eleanor Green, who masterminded this show, ''John Graham: Artist and Avatar,'' and the Phillips Collection in Washington, which invited her to do so, that she has not only disentangled the brilliance from the bragadoccio but has also written of her findings with insight and humor. Indicating the complexity of the task, the curator includes among the many people who helped her the editor who, she says, kept her manuscript ''from reading like one of Graham's.''
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. As the story goes, the artist would also have shared the Czar's fate if it hadn't been for the guard who saw the ''genius'' in his drawings and allowed him to escape. He served as a cavalry officer in World War I, fighting against Rumania, but claimed also to have participated in pogroms and liked to demonstrate how to lop heads off without dismounting.
By noting that Arshile Gorky invented his name, his connections with the writer Maxim Gorky and his studies under Kandinsky, Ms. Green makes it clear that, better painter though he was, Gorky couldn't carry his friend's saddlebags when it came to falsification. * * *
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 as David Smith (whom he later alienated by likening abstraction to the making of refrigerators), Dorothy Dehner, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning (who has confirmed that Graham alone was the discoverer of Pollock).
One truth proved by the 75-odd paintings is that he who brags is compensating. In life, Graham used his own personality to make an impact; in art, he appropriated - until his later years - the personalities of others. The Neo-Classical and 1930's-40's Picasso, Derain, Braque, Stuart Davis, Gorky and Pollock all have their moments in the show. There are hints of both Rousseau and van Gogh in the bright, flatly painted heads of soldiers and ''Self-Portrait as Harlequin,'' all from the early 40's. The viewer gets the feeling that Graham stole from his contemporaries the better to promote his own faith in Modernism. Still, his theft from de Kooning is perplexing, first because he was a better draftsman than his victim, second because the only firm evidence here of the theft is a de Kooning ''Seated Figure (Classic Male)'' of 1939.
And the trouble with this image is that while it comes at the start of a very definite phase in de Kooning's art, it has all the weirdness of Graham when he finally became himself as an artist. The pink figure has an androgynous head and shoulders and one female-looking breast, all painted in a paler pink, and behind it stands the ghost of another, more masculine form. It's a short distance between this and the women Graham began painting a few years later. Cross-eyed, walleyed, one-eyed creatures with slits in their necks that sometimes have lips but look like the work of vampires nonetheless, they mark for some observers the collapse of Graham's art. * * *
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. Ms. Green is more than justified in relating the consistency of the late work to the stability and happiness that this veteran of four marriages was then enjoying with Marianne Strate. She was for once a woman his equal in age and intellect, and her death in 1955 left him distraught, though financially secure.
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. (Through Sept. 19 at the Neuberger Museum on the campus of the State University of New York in Purchase. After closing there, the show will embark on a yearlong tour that takes in California and Chicago and ends in Washington, at the Phillips Collection, founded by the painter's great patron.) Kirill Zdanevich Rachel Adler Gallery 1018 Madison Avenue (at 79th Street) Through July 31
In the Paris of 1909, the founding Futurist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, pronounced a racing car more beautiful than the ''Winged Victory of Samothrace.'' Four years later, Ilya Zdanevich was declaring, in Moscow, that an American shoe was more beautiful than the ''Venus de Milo.'' The graphic designer and publisher who was to persuade the likes of Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Matisse and Picasso to illustrate books that would ''revise human values,'' Ilya had just produced his first work, a catalogue raisonne of paintings by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Gontcharova. They, in turn, had just come up with Rayism or Rayonnism, the Russian counterpart of Futurism (the book is in the current show by Ilya, also known as Iliazd, at the Museum of Modern Art).
It was around the same time that Kirill Zdanevich, the book artist's elder brother and the subject of this exhibition at the Rachel Adler Gallery, signed the Rayist Manifesto. A selection of 90-plus drawings and reproductions, this show includes several portraits of Larionov and other notables, including Georgii Gurdjieff and Sergei Diaghilev. However, the exhibition's chief purpose is to draw attention to Tiflis (now Tbilisi), which was the brothers' birthplace and which, from 1917 to 1921, was made an Athens by the poets and painters who were keeping out of Bolshevism's way. In this respect, it will interest most of those familiar with the city and with the convolutions of Russia's short-lived Modernist movement.
As a visual experience, it raises the question of whether Cubism would have spread so far if the wolf of Futurism hadn't used it as sheep's clothing. Not that the drawings reflect much of Futurism's jazzy dynamic. Their spirit is, rather, one of modest experimentation usually in the Cubist mode, but not always -some pencil portraits, especially those of women in hats, are quick line drawings and quite humorous. Incidentally, the ''hot'' contemporaries who take pride in not being consistent may be dismayed to find Kirill was practicing ''Everythingism,'' in 1916.
Ilya repaired to Paris in 1921, along with Larionov, Gontcharova and others, but Kirill remained in Tiflis, where he pursued stage design for a while. He moved to Moscow in the 1930's, only to be deported to a labor camp during the 40's. Released a decade later, he returned to Moscow, to be given, in 1963, the honorary title ''Man Devoted to the Fine Arts'' and, later, permission to see his brother -for the first time in 46 years - in Paris. He died in Tbilisi in 1969, at the age of 77. The show focuses on the period 1918 to 1920 but includes a few late efforts, one of which is a circa 1940 book jacket in which the artist has blended Social Realism with Cubism a la Time magazine covers of the same era. Robert Yucikas Ted Greenwald Gallery 181 Mott Street Through July 25
Robert Yucikas's canvases are taller than they are wide, and each is filled with vertical and diagonal bands. Painted in uninflected washes of muted colors, the bands run side by side then drift apart only to come together again, overlapping or intersecting with each other. Most are accented by a thin stripe of a bright, opaque hue - scarlet on crimson, turquoise on sage green, ice blue on gray. The best are images where the tones are closest, for they give the viewer the impression of looking down on a landscape made of suede with highways marked by fluorescent medians. Mr. Yucikas has had some critical attention but deserves more, if only because of his gift for holding color and shape in close-to-perfect equilibrium.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/03/arts/art-john-graham-a-brilliant-scoundrel.html
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