The Mysterious John Graham Revealed at Newport Harbor

OK, here is the script--it’s 1920, a White Russian aristocrat fleeing the Bolsheviks escapes to New York with his beautiful wife and new baby. He is a dashing former lieutenant in the Czar’s cavalry and a man of great learning, speaking a dozen languages. In his homeland he served as a lawyer and judge. Despite these accomplishments, he is initially unable to find work in New York and is reduced to teaching horsemanship while his wife serves as a governess.

But the Russian--let’s call him Ivan Dombrowski--is talented and resilient. He decides to exercise a knack for drawing with both hands to become an artist. Soon he is at the epicenter of Manhattan’s art world and remains well-connected in Europe. He studies with John Sloan at the Art Students League and befriends Stuart Davis in Paris. The renowned collector Duncan Phillips becomes Dombrowski’s patron, buying works and sending him a regular stipend. The artist single-handedly discovers Picasso and Jackson Pollock. He is a friend and early champion of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and many of the Abstract Expressionists.

Cosmopolitan charm and pyrotechnical intelligence act as an open sesame for Dombrowski, who attracts everyone in the art scene including such rivals as Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art and Hilla Rebay, the inspiration for the Guggenhein Museum. Dombrowski is gracious and generous. He gives a wire portrait of himself to a friend. The work is by Alexander Calder.

Dombrowski is caustic, maniacally egocentric, insulting and stingy. He lives like a Russian monk in a cell-like apartment. He dashes to the back of the bus, forcing his friends to pay his fare. He denounces Picasso as a fraud.

When not painting, Dombrowski acts as an art dealer, curator and important theoretical writer on art. In his spare time he womanizes relentlessly, marrying three or four times and seducing every pretty girl in sight with the fervor and success of a Casanova. It gets him in trouble. He is sacked from a teaching job for fiddling with a young student. Moralistic collectors stop buying his work. It gets him out of trouble. He marries an heiress who dies and leaves him financially secure.

Dombrowski thinks he is immortal, the half-human son of Jupiter and an Earth woman. To ensure his eternal life, he studies occult sciences like theosophy and practices yoga. He is so successful at maintaining his youthful looks and physical vigor that he does cart-wheels in his 70s, has a fling with Picasso’s former mistress, Francoise Gilot, and pursues romances with two beauties in their 20s. One is the Andy Warhol superstar, Ultra Violet.

Dombrowski dies at 75 in a London hospital on June 27, 1961, after consciously purging all his bodily fluids, a feat said to be possible only for an advanced master of yoga.

You believe that yarn? Good yarn but clearly invented by some Hollywood scriptwriter suckled on “The Picture of Dorian Grey.” Anyone who knows anything about real artists knows they don’t act like that. They work all the time. Except for their art and interesting minds, their biographies tend to be a little dull. Dombrowski doesn’t wash. Somebody made him up.

Right. And guess who it was?

Dombrowski.

He was a real person. I mean he existed. But he was one of those characters who invented himself to be mythical and larger than life, his own greatest artwork. They say he was a precursor of people like Warhol and Gilbert and George. Arshile Gorky’s real name was Voisdan Adoian. Dombrowski called himself John Graham and embroidered the truth until it was a Byzantine tapestry of fiction welded to the sinews of fact.

And you know what’s crazy? The part I just told you, that’s the true part. Well, he was really Polish and not Russian, he never acted as a judge and he did not discover Picasso--but the rest is factual as far as they can figure.

Now there is a traveling exhibition of John Graham’s art at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Organized by the Phillips Collection in Washington, it nonetheless fits perfectly into the sensibility of museum curator Paul Schimmel, who likes the offbeat tributaries of contemporary art (as if all of it were not offbeat enough by everyday standards). The Graham retrospective--the first ever out here--is so bewitching it threatens to swamp an otherwise respectable companion showing of 10 winners in the sixth annual round of Awards in the Visual Arts that is also on view to Jan. 3.

When word got out that the Graham show was coming, even decently literate art pros hereabouts looked politely blank. Graham is the kind of artist known mainly to lovers of esoterica--rather like the German fetish doll maker Hans Bellmer, with whom Graham shared a slick drawing style and presumptive hang-ups. Even art mavens tend to have but a single image of Graham, the guy who painted the cross-eyed ladies.

If you knew nothing of Graham’s fabulous biography, a close look at the work soon shows there is something weird going on here. The earliest bit is a drawing of a nude in a chair. Graham, a late starter, was already 37 when he made it but it betrays no beginner’s awkwardness. It looks like something made by a particularly clever computer that scanned the drawings of Rodin and Matisse, mixed and coordinated their styles and then effortlessly lasered the drawing onto paper.

The show goes on like that. Chomp. “Blue Abstraction” of 1931 absorbs Cubism. It is more like Braque than Picasso but slightly distinctive. Chomp, Chomp. “El Picador” and “Queen of Hearts” bracket Picasso from his patterned paintings to the bullfight series. Chomp. A series of soldier portraits from the ‘40s cross-reference German Expressionism with the Douanier Rousseau. Chomp. Stuart Davis landscapes. Chomp. Emblematic Abstraction.

Graham’s undoubted influence on New York School artists was primarily intellectual and psychological. He introduced artists to African sculpture and to the psychoanalytic philosophy of Jung. Extensively psychoanalyzed himself, he practiced a bit of informal analysis and claimed to have helped Pollock more than his professional shrink.

What he got in return was grist for his own art. He swiped from everybody and stitched the pieces together with the seamless taste of a fashion designer. He finally achieved a distinctive look in the ‘40s when he converted his obsession with women into his endless series of female portraits people remember because they are cross-eyed.

Actually, that is not what is really memorable about them. What is, is that they are so extraordinarily well-drawn. Even the crossed eyes are an hilariously perverse technical device for “turning the form,” as the artists say--that is making the volumes look rounder.

Sometimes these works look Surrealistic even though he held the style in contempt. His great tour de force, “Marya,” is like a Gorky-influenced Ingres but the romantic lady in the decollete black dress is bleeding from a slashed wrist that she seems not to notice. In the portrait “Venere Lucifera” the head is surrounded with astrological and occult symbols as if Graham were trying to tap the poetry of Joseph Cornell. He doesn’t make it.

What Graham achieved is not all that unfamiliar to anybody who has looked at a lot of art and made some themselves. He draws like people who start out to be artists and realize that, although skillful, they would probably do better at something else. Graham draws like art students who wind up as curators, critics, teachers or dealers. His work, like theirs, is dominated by taste and intelligence rather than intuition and passion. The difference is that Graham was ambitious, tenacious and frighteningly smart.

The results are breathtaking drawings of limited range that are nonetheless connoisseurs’ treasures. They offer the same delights as the works of the Italian Mannerists, Bronzino or Daniel Volterra. Graham shares their neurotic perfectionism, perversity and sadomasochistic overtones.

At a time when pioneering in art was everything, Graham found himself stuck with an essentially conventional, if highly refined, vision. He finally could not escape the fact that he was an obsessive European dandy, dilettante and narcissist. He did the best with it he could. He took it to the greatest extreme. There are reasons to admire people who make themselves into oversized, virtually fictional figures, but John Graham gives us the downside too. Make yourself into a chimerical person with the head of a Doberman and the tail of a kangaroo and you are going to make artificial art, fascinating and heartless. The best thing about Graham is when he combines his aesthetic sensitivity with the exquisite tenderness he sometimes felt for those women.

The accidental coupling of Graham’s eccentricity with the showing of 10 contemporary artists who recently received the Awards in the Visual Arts sets one musing about how ordinary the unconventional has become. These national awards are bestowed by a righteously correct selection system exercised by art professionals. This should be a good thing but looking at the results suggests that art has long since atrophied into a neo-academic activity where artists are chosen according to their ability to perform variations on established precedent that can be understood by the judges. The chances of a Graham, a real wild card, penetrating that network seem slim indeed.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of this art functions at very high frequency. Jill Geigerich, for example, makes all sorts of funny cutouts that suggest ordinary things, materials and styles on their way to becoming something else. There is an almost alchemical sense of transformation in, for example, a cutout of a bathroom faucet that appears to be made of corrugated rubber that is actually painted carpet. But you have to ask yourself to what extent its effect depends on prior knowledge of Cubism, Oldenburg-style pop art and Marcel Duchamp.

There is a nice grim socio-poetic edge to Christopher Brown’s paintings of heads floating chin deep in something that could be water, pollution or oceans of depressing thoughts about earthquakes and stock-market crashes. Maybe it works whether or not you know how much it owes to the late Philip Guston. Maybe it’s better if you don’t know.

It is, however, a bother that every one of these artists works in the shadow of a modern master or some hot contemporary artist. Peter Huttinger cozies up to originality in his punk-graphic-tinged images of rabbits amid fields of waxed nature relief, but it turns out to be Jean Dubuffet’s ferocious beasties domesticated into sweet little ding-a-ling Easter bunnies.

I don’t want to belabor this, but how come there is so much H. C. Westermann in Hollis Sigler, such a big dose of vulgarized Francis Bacon in Ross Bleckner and such a heavy serving of Rosenquist in James Michaels? Archie Rand scoops up the whole current pantheon from Keith Haring to David Salle.

You almost start to sympathize with those discouraged artists who just frankly go around copying old art. Well, maybe we have just come to this. After all, new cars all tend to look alike these days, too.

Wait. Hold on. These Awards in Visual Arts artists look even more alike than a Mazda and a Nissan. There is a shared thing about brushy Expressionism that corrals even the abstractionists Michael Tracy and William Willis. There isn’t supposed to be a mainstream these days but this selection feels like there is. It’s a respectable and conscientious selection, but there is no jolt to it. There isn’t a bracing wrong-way intelligence like Graham in the lot.