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Lot Essay
Though dated only two years apart, these two works on paper depict the heads of two women with radically different stylistic approaches. Graham, who would greatly influence a generation of Abstract Expressionists painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, was a decidedly figurative painter, albeit not a realist one. Portrait of a Princess depicts an imaginary, even mythic and divine, female ideal in a style reminiscent of sinewy and curvaceous lines of his European contemporaries Picasso
and Matisse. Where Portrait of a Princess is a fictional portrait, Head of a Woman, like so many of Graham’s female portraits from the 1940s and 1950s, was inspired by his relationship with Marianne Strate, the mother of famed gallerist Ileana Sonnabend.
Executed in 1944 within a year of meeting here, the drawing expresses the tenderness he felt towards his beloved. Here, Graham exercises his technical skill as a draftsman, rendering the Strate’s head with a subtle touch using the elegant medium of silverpoint to express the fine curves of her face. As Graham connoisseur and curator of the artist’s 1987 retrospective at The Philips Collection in Washington, D.C., Eleanor Green notes about the drawing, Strate herself may have encourage the artist’s forays with silverpoint, given her experience as an accomplished book binder.
Green writes, “It is possible to be fairly accurate in dating paintings within the span of years Graham and Marianne spent together, because they have a Renaissance air of controlled balance [quite a contrast to the artist’s mercurial temperament], with none of the arcane, expressionist motifs of the later paintings” (E. Green, John Graham: Artist and Avatar, exh. cat.; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1987, p. 68).
and Matisse. Where Portrait of a Princess is a fictional portrait, Head of a Woman, like so many of Graham’s female portraits from the 1940s and 1950s, was inspired by his relationship with Marianne Strate, the mother of famed gallerist Ileana Sonnabend.
Executed in 1944 within a year of meeting here, the drawing expresses the tenderness he felt towards his beloved. Here, Graham exercises his technical skill as a draftsman, rendering the Strate’s head with a subtle touch using the elegant medium of silverpoint to express the fine curves of her face. As Graham connoisseur and curator of the artist’s 1987 retrospective at The Philips Collection in Washington, D.C., Eleanor Green notes about the drawing, Strate herself may have encourage the artist’s forays with silverpoint, given her experience as an accomplished book binder.
Green writes, “It is possible to be fairly accurate in dating paintings within the span of years Graham and Marianne spent together, because they have a Renaissance air of controlled balance [quite a contrast to the artist’s mercurial temperament], with none of the arcane, expressionist motifs of the later paintings” (E. Green, John Graham: Artist and Avatar, exh. cat.; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1987, p. 68).