The Brooklyn Rail

Graham arrived in New York in late 1975 with wind in his sails—an artist of promise coming to America, the land of promise. He had been trained at Camberwell, then at the Royal School of Art in London before receiving a Rome Prize from the British Academy in Rome that took him to Italy for several years. There he developed the idea of painting the sunrise and sunset, almost as a provocation to others who scoffed at it. He later said, “I’m very foolhardy in terms of taking on clichéd images. Images that have become so well known, and therefore dangerous, are for me thrilling.”¹

He was the son of an artist, and grew up in the remote countryside of Lancashire. His brother was an artist and today his daughter has joined the family tradition. He was proud of that lineage and legacy. He came to the United States on a Harkness Fellowship, and immersed himself in the art world. Andrew Forge, who taught at Yale, took him under his wing.

Graham frequented gallery openings and artist open houses that occurred with regularity at 820 Broadway, where Frank Stella, Larry Poons, Paul Jenkins, and Bill Rubin, all had lofts at the time.

An early breakthrough was meeting Jeffrey Hoffeld, who saw one of his paintings in a friend’s apartment and invited him to show his work at Hirschl and Adler. Major museums and prominent collectors began to purchase his work.

Through Andrew Forge, he was introduced to the New York Studio School, where he would become Dean in 1988. To this chaotic bastion of art for art’s sake and defender of the painterly tradition, he brought order, deep thoughtfulness and the articulation of its mission as a place to learn the “great language of art.” He recently wrote, “It’s about time, and making time into something tangible, physical, something plastic.”²

He relished the bright light of America, and loved the beach for the luminous experience it offered. Ensconced in a dark, virtually windowless loft on a then deserted stretch of Broadway (between Prince and Spring!) he began to turn out huge tableaux of intense color, whose figures exhibited an ambiguous sense of detachment that only contributed to their resonance as expressions from an unknowable language. He wrote that his work expresses “the idea of language and how a figure can become part of a greater sentence is part of the quest. …the connection between two figures is like the difficulty of two languages trying to understand each other.”³

Graham’s physical presence in some ways conveyed that same ambiguity. Slender and slight, with dark, penetrating eyes and a black beard, wearing button-down shirts of saturated blue, he was self-contained and soft-spoken, thoughtful with a deep well of knowledge and wisdom. He always spoke about art—Cézanne, Seurat, Piero della Francesca, and other painters who were the lifelong beacons for his work. There was a sense of metaphysical detachment in his manner and in his work, a person struggling inside of himself to understand and capture, at every moment and in every encounter, the wondrous world around him.

For his self-absorption, Graham was also effective as a leader. I joined the board of the Studio School in 1990. He convinced me that he needed help managing the institution. In fact, he neither needed nor readily accepted guidance. He knew what he wanted to do. In a relatively short time, he launched the now legendary Drawing Marathon, a deep immersion into what has become known as the School’s “style” – “an anguished drawing with compressed charcoal, replete with smudges and erasure,” ⁴ inherited from the work of Mercedes Matter, the School’s founder.

At the School, Graham gathered artists, collectors, former students, curators and art dealers around him who were happy to do their part to help the institution. Evening lectures, an annual silent auction in the fall, and a spring art sale “Anonymous was a Masterpiece,” continue to draw together people who respect the School’s values and want to ensure that its unique vision of drawing as a search for the essence of reality, and its iconic home at 8 West 8th Street, will survive.

Supported by his loving wife Dita Amory, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum whose passion for and knowledge of art complemented his own, and a beloved daughter Serena who now follows in his aspiration to master the great language, he left behind a cadre of students and colleagues who benefited from his wisdom and from the strength of his devotion to art.