John D. Graham was a figure of immense influence in the early years of American modernism, both as an artist and as a connoisseur. Born in Kiev on January 8, 1881, his real name was Ivan Gratianovich Dombrovski. He fought in the Russian Revolution on the side of the czar, was imprisoned, but escaped to Poland. He is thought to have arrived in New York City in about 1920. Once in New York, he hid himself behind a curtain of fact and myth.

In 1923 Graham was enrolled at the Art Students League, working briefly as an assistant to John Sloan. There is little concrete information that Graham had any previous art experience. In 1925 he participated in the "Tenth Whitney Annual Exhibition". That year he moved to Baltimore with the painter Elinor Gibson, the first of his two American wives. Before moving to the United States, he also had been twice married in Russia.

In Baltimore, he became associated with the renowned collector Duncan Phillips, who gave Graham his first one-person museum exhibition in 1929. Phillips described Grahams bearing, with his air of Russian migr officer of noble descent, his classical education and commitment to art, as an "ambition for martyrdom", one which gave him an aura of Old World mystery and romance. He became an American citizen in 1927, although he lived and worked in both New York and Paris, becoming a catalyst in the transmittal of European modernism to America. He counted among his friends such names as Stuart Davis, Dorothy Dehner, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, Katherine Dreier, Willem de Kooning, and, in later years, Jackson Pollock.

Interested in African art, and very knowledgeable about European art, Graham is known to have influenced many American counterparts. He and his writing in System and Dialectics of Art (1937) are thought to have greatly advanced the development of abstract expressionism. Graham believed that the subconscious mind contained distant past images and that through art, access to these memories could be gained. One of his more noteworthy works is Palermo, Landscape and Houses (1928, oil on canvas), a static scene, somewhat resembling a stage set, that hovers somewhere between landscape and abstraction.

Late in his life he was financially secure, but isolated from the art world because of his highly personal style. He spent many hours doing meditation and yoga, and corresponding with women friends, who included Ultra Violet, Andy Warhols movie star, as well as the artist Francoise Gilot. His final works were similar to those of the Renaissance old masters.

His art can be seen in several public collections at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and The Phillips Collection of Washington, D.C.

Graham died in 1961 in London, England.