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Lot Essay
In the 1930s, John Graham was declared by The New York Times to be “an avid defender of the modernist position in art” (J. Mellow, “John Graham: An Underground Realist,” The New York Times, 1 September 1968). A friend and mentor to many of the painters who would go on to become founding members of the New York School of abstract painting (including Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock), Graham’s early work was distinguished by dramatic blocks of geometric color. However, by the 1940s his post-Cubist style of abstraction had given way to a new mode of painting that was based on classical prototypes. Painted in 1954, Head of a Woman is an exemplar from this important period of discovery, displaying many of the influences from the Italian Renaissance that would come to define his later career.
The present work skillfully incorporates Renaissance ideals of feminine beauty, most noticeably those found in the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, with contemporary painterly flourishes. Here, Graham’s striking female figure is composed of flowing brushwork overlaid with a grid-like structure, exhibiting the same combination of artistic and scientific principles that can be seen in works such as da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (circa 1503-1506, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and Vitruvian Man (circa 1490, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice).
In Head of a Woman, the artist painted his image on the reverse of a sheet of tracing paper, which also lends a muted, shimmering quality to its surface. He then added details at the front in ink, enhancing the work’s overall complexity. Reinforcing this surface tension is a system of squares and rectangles, as well as astrological symbols superimposed on the sitter’s face. Also visible is a handwritten text from Dante’s Divine Comedy; translated from the formal Italian it aptly reads “don’t think about what other people think or say, but just keep straight and follow your own path.” Included in the artist’s first institutional retrospective, The Museum of Modern Art’s 1968 exhibition John D. Graham: Paintings and Drawings, the present work showcased his later oeuvre, with critics declaring “these late works… have a strange and compelling authority” (ibid.). More recently, the painting was selected for the Parrish Art Museum’s retrospective John Graham: Maverick Modernist in 2017.
The present work skillfully incorporates Renaissance ideals of feminine beauty, most noticeably those found in the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, with contemporary painterly flourishes. Here, Graham’s striking female figure is composed of flowing brushwork overlaid with a grid-like structure, exhibiting the same combination of artistic and scientific principles that can be seen in works such as da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (circa 1503-1506, Musée du Louvre, Paris) and Vitruvian Man (circa 1490, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice).
In Head of a Woman, the artist painted his image on the reverse of a sheet of tracing paper, which also lends a muted, shimmering quality to its surface. He then added details at the front in ink, enhancing the work’s overall complexity. Reinforcing this surface tension is a system of squares and rectangles, as well as astrological symbols superimposed on the sitter’s face. Also visible is a handwritten text from Dante’s Divine Comedy; translated from the formal Italian it aptly reads “don’t think about what other people think or say, but just keep straight and follow your own path.” Included in the artist’s first institutional retrospective, The Museum of Modern Art’s 1968 exhibition John D. Graham: Paintings and Drawings, the present work showcased his later oeuvre, with critics declaring “these late works… have a strange and compelling authority” (ibid.). More recently, the painting was selected for the Parrish Art Museum’s retrospective John Graham: Maverick Modernist in 2017.