Born in Kiev in 1886, a descendant of minor Polish nobility, Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowski trained as a lawyer in his hometown, served in the Russian army, and in 1918 was briefly imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary; upon arriving in New York in 1920, he found work as a riding instructor. What led this thirty-six-year-old who’d never picked up a brush to enroll in the Art Students League in 1922? Who knows. But it turned the anti-Bolshevik émigré into one of the revolutionaries of American art. As John Graham, he was part of the triumvirate (along with Arshile Gorky and Stuart Davis) whom Willem