John Graham and the quest for an American Art in the 1920s and 1930s.
Item
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Title
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John Graham and the quest for an American Art in the 1920s and 1930s.
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Identifier
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AAI3288949
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identifier
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3288949
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Creator
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Longwell, Alicia G.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Katherine Manthorne
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History
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Abstract
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Few accounts of twentieth-century art omit mention of the name John D. Graham (born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowski in Kiev, 1886; died in London, 1961), yet he remains an enigmatic figure. This dissertation examines for the first time his role in American Art the 1920s and 1930s, as both artist and theoretician, played out against the backdrop of European modernism.;Graham was emblematic of the artists, many of them recent immigrants to the United States, who countered the inward-looking trend of Regionalism in the 1920s and 1930s and strove to create an American art untethered to the past. Chapter One examines his early years in Russia and his exposure to European modernism as it was received there in the years preceding World War I. Chapter Two looks at his life in New York and in Paris in the 1920s and what strategies he used during this decade to transform himself into a thoroughly American artist. Chapter Three considers the creative intersection of Graham and fellow artists Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky in the late 1920s and the 1930s, as well as Graham's fluid interchange with leading collectors and patrons, including Duncan Phillips, Frank Crowninshield, and Katherine Dreier. His involvement with African Art, both as connoisseur and dealer, will also be examined. Chapter Four provides an analysis of Graham's influential text System and Dialectics of Art (1937), its critical reception, and its influence on other artists. A Coda offers an assessment of Graham's contribution to American art and his role as catalyst in the 1920s and 1930s and as artistic progenitor for a generation of younger artists---all examined through the lens of the exhibition he organized for McMillen, Inc., in 1942. Hanging the work of young American artists, unknown until he discovered them, alongside titans of the international art world ultimately said more about Graham's fervor, vigor and resolve than all the words he had written.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
