"American Vanguards" at the Neuberger Museum PURCHASE, N.Y. - "American Vanguards," the new exhibition at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y., reunites the Four Musketeers of New York painting: John Graham, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning. For a time - the 1930s, give or take a few years - these artists linked arms to defend modern American art against the dreariness and insularity of the Depression. The group's de facto leader was Graham, but its nickname came from de Kooning, who saw himself as its d'Artagnan. And this show benefits, tremendously, from fresh memories of the recent de Kooning retrospective at MoMA. It expands upon the first few galleries of that retrospective, with their eerie still lifes and fidgety renderings of seated men and women. Organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., "American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, and Their Circle, 1927-1942" gathers some 60 works by the artists of the title and others, including Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock and David Smith. It travels this June to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Tex., before going home to the Addison in the fall. Its curators, the scholars William C. Agee, Irving Sandler and Karen Wilkin, aren't just trying to reassemble the Musketeers. They want to show that art of the 1930s wasn't all dour and provincial - that artists had more choices than WPA murals, American Scene painting and Social Realism. But first they reintroduce us to Graham (1886-1961), aptly characterized by Hilton Kramer as "one of the oddest and most exotic figures in the art of our time." Who was John Graham? Before fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, he was Ivan Gratianovich Dombrowski, a Kiev-born descendant of Polish nobility, a lawyer and an officer in the czar's army. In America he reinvented himself as an artist, all-around aesthete and ambassador of European modernism. Younger New York painters, eager for the latest art journals and gossip from Paris (where Graham had many contacts), hung on his every word. Some of them, like de Kooning and Gorky, were immigrants themselves. In his book "System and Dialectics of Art," first published in 1937 but written over several years, he addressed mysticism, primitivism, and Freudian and Jungian theories in the form of a Socratic dialogue. And he listed "young, outstanding American painters," including Davis, David Smith and "W. Kooning." As "American Vanguards" reveals, Graham's taste changed quite a bit between the late 1920s and early 40s. He would eventually renounce much of the abstract art he had championed earlier, returning to a figurative mode informed by Ingres and Poussin. Initially, at least, he was a strong advocate of Synthetic Cubism (specifically Picasso's). At the Neuberger a room of 1928-29 still-lifes by Gorky, de Kooning and Davis finds the Musketeers tossing around one of Graham's favorite motifs, the egg, in his favorite idiom. Three of Graham's own paintings, from around 1930, attest to his preference for flat, biomorphic forms in overlapping, collagelike arrangements. Graham, unlike his fellow Musketeers, was not a great artist. But as this show intimates, he helped the others become great. He freed Gorky from a dangerous pattern of copying the masters; he encouraged de Kooning to keep working with the figure; he kept Davis's politics from overwhelming his art. He was also an expert matchmaker, introducing Davis to Fernand Léger and David Smith to Julio Gonzalez and Picasso (not in person but through magazine photographs). "American Vanguards" celebrates both of these fix-ups, with ample selections of Smith's early welded-metal sculptures and Davis's paintings of whirring gadgetry and mechanized cityscapes. Graham was a king maker too, as evidenced by a sampling of "American and French Paintings" (the exhibition he organized for the McMillen Gallery in 1942). Placing the unknown Pollock, Lee Krasner and "William Kooning" in the august company of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and other established Europeans, it opened the door for Abstract Expressionism. But by the end of World War II Graham had become a bit of a curmudgeon. He dismissed abstract art, called Picasso a "charlatan" and deleted the names of his bright young Americans from the latest edition of his "Systems and Dialectics." We don't know why he suddenly felt compelled to choose between abstraction and the figure, having facilitated their peaceful coexistence for more than a decade. Fortunately the other Musketeers (who were not really a group by this point) did not pick sides. The show's final gallery is quite clear on this point, unleashing Gorky's swashbuckling "Pirate I" (1942-43) and the wild-eyed, splay-fingered woman in a 1943 de Kooning on the stiff, scowling bald men of Graham's "Poussin m'Instruit" (1944). The curators of "American Vanguards" have made their case, though, which is that anyone hoping to get the big picture of American art in the 1930s must contend with this small band of sparring painters. "American Vanguards" continues through April 29 at the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, N.Y.; (914) 251-6100, neuberger.org.