John Graham
See also:  [Abstract Expressionism (ab-ex)]
                  [Lee Krasner (ab-ex; Mrs. Jackson Pollock)]
                  [Harold Rosenberg] (art critic)
                  [Jackson Pollock] (ab-ex, painter, the drip-meister)

                  [Art films]

John Graham

John Graham (b. 1881, prob. Poland; d, )

aka "Ivan Darowsky"

BLOCKQUOTE

From the superb book by Ellen G. Landau,
"Jackson Pollock" ISBN 0.8109.8186.6
(Kyoto, 2000) Abradale Press (Abrams, natch), P.79.


Who was John Graham, and how and why did he come to exert
so much influence on this important phase of Jackson 
Pollock's development? [ie, the transitional from cubism to ab-ex]

[Graham was] born with the name Ivan Dabrowsky, possibly in
Russia (so he always said), but probably in Poland in 1881.
Graham boasted that he had been a cavalry officer in 
Grand Duke Michaels Wild Brigade. Graham always had an 
aura of being above the law. "I was born to power and 
trained to rule," he explained. Like many others, Lee
Krasner remembered John Graham as devilishly handsome,
"a mad, wild beautiful person" -- despite the fact that 
his demeanor was "taut" with the Russian army clearly
in his bearing. Supposedly spirited out of his mother
country after the Revolution by a sympathetic Bolshevik
general, John Graham spend the 1920's in Baltimore and
Paris. Through the Cone sisters, whom he knew from the
United States, Graham was introduced to the famous 
AMeerican expatriate Gertrude Stein in France,
and her salon provied him witht eh opportunity to meet 
advanced artists including Picasso. Through friendship 
with Paul E'luard and André Breton, Graham also
traveled in Surrealist circles. He had two solo exhibitions
at the 

END BLOCKQUOTE

Chronology