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“Art is a creative process of abstracting,” John D. Graham wrote as an answer to the very first question (“What is art?”) posed in his 1937 book System and Dialectics of Art. A few years later, he would effectively abandon abstraction for the final period of his life, opting instead to create portraits of women with crossed eyes and of himself as a shaman. So maybe consistency (and subtlety) weren’t his strongest suits—but as one of the key figures bridging the U.S.’s first wave of modernism and Abstract Expressionism, consistency and subtlety weren’t really what the moment called for. Graham was a connector and a shepherd, putting words to ideas without names and creating new artistic pathways in the process, in real time. Artists collected around him: Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock (who was so taken with an essay of Graham’s in Magazine of Art that he reached out to him in a letter in 1939, eventually sparking a deep friendship). In the 1950s, toward the end of his life, Pollock said this of his friend: “There’s only one man who really knows what it’s about—John Graham.” Graham painted “Still Life with Fish” in 1941, still in his abstract period but reaching toward its culmination. As a Picasso devotee early in his career, the mark of European cubism is strongly felt in Graham’s still lives of the late 1920s and ‘30s (just look at the 1931 “Blue Still Life”—the way he divides the picture plane, the inclusion of an African mask, and the blue palette all conjure Picasso without much effort, though Graham would bristle at the direct comparison). “Still Life with Fish,” by contrast, is wilder and freer, more completely its own world. Graham takes the kernel of the bold outline from his earlier work and sets it loose in his 1941 composition, swooping, winding, and pin-balling its way across a radiant assemblage of pattern and color. The fish, despite appearing in the title, gets second billing here (note the eye and head about a third of the way up the righthand portion of the painting, lines and ruffle below it nodding, perhaps, to fins). The main event is really the shock of white, a form shooting bolts and tendrils in a strange slant, top right to bottom left. It simultaneously wrenches open and holds together the whole work. It’s a bit like Graham himself. In 1941, Graham was in the midst of organizing the “French and American Painters” exhibition at McMillen Gallery in New York City. His concept was to take the European modernists he loved (Picasso, Braque, Matisse) and place them beside still relatively green American artists (Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock) who Graham viewed as their absolute equals. It was a bold idea and a watershed event, reflecting over a decade of thinking, sifting, and refining of Graham’s aesthetic philosophies. And then, in a flash, he was summarily denouncing Picasso (“Like all mediocrities, he achieved success during his lifetime, while greater men remain in the shade”) and on to the next phase. Maybe art for Graham wasn’t, after all that, a process of abstracting. Maybe it was even simpler. Maybe it was just the process of change. To inquire about this painting, go here.
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