Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of this artist. Many art professionals, until recently, haven’t either. Not even prominent art gallery owners, curators or directors. It’s as if the painter, who influenced artists like Willem deKooning was hiding from history. We first discovered this painting about a year ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where excited visitors were posing for photographs mimicking the cross-eyed women. James Kalm of The Brooklyn Rail wrote: “though “original,” Graham’s women are composed from quotations or paraphrases of Renaissance masterpieces.” ... Just like his friend and colleague Arshile Gorky, John Graham John Graham took on a new name after he arrived in the US. Born Ivan Dabrowsky in Kiev, Graham fled the newly formed Soviet Union after collaborating with the Crimean counterrevolutionaries against the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror campaigns that swept through the country. By the time of his arrival in NY (via Paris) Graham was well familiar with the work of the leading Russian avant-garde and non-objective artists like Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Vladimir Tatlin, David Burliuk, Kasimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky and he brought these ideas to his practice in the US. Once in the New York Graham enrolled in the Art Students League studying side by side with Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Alexander Calder, and Elinor Gibson. His book, Systems and Dialects of Art (1937), introduced the budding New York artists to the significance of the unconscious as a source of inspiration, and thus contributed to the earliest developments of Abstract Expressionism. In 1942, he organized a show for the McMillen Gallery that featured works by Stuart Davis, David Burliuk, de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and himself across from works by Picasso, George Braque, and Henri Matisse.... http://www.galleryintell.com/artex/two-sisters-by-john-graham/ undefined

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