Ceramist and painter John R. Grabach was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 2, 1886. He studied at the Art Students League of New York City and became an Ash Can practitioner by the 1920s, painting at Cape Ann with his student Henry Gasser. He moved to Los Angeles in 1920 and was a member of the Painters and Sculptors of Los Angeles from 1927-1928 before moving to Irvington, New Jersey to open a studio and painted in the alla prima style outdoors (direct painting technique).

Grabach could paint in an academic manner the human figure and at the beginning of his career he painted figures and portraits before turning to landscape painting outdoors, using strong color to heighten pictorial composition. By the 1930s and 1940s he combined techniques from expressionism and modernism and painted abstract elements into his art, using vibrant, bold colors with a flowing, modernistic brush or palette knife technique.  Never hesitating, the competent artist energetically laid down paint. Paintings like Trout Fisherman show the powerful veracity behind his stroke.

For over thirty years John R. Grabach taught students from the Art Students League and elsewhere how to paint with confidence the American landscape and by the end of his life he had many devotees.  

His paintings are in the permanent collections at the Crocker Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Los Angeles Country Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Norton Museum of Art, The Columbus Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Smith College Art Museum, El Paso Museum of Art, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, John H. Vanderpoel AA (Chicago) and the Newark Museum. 

In honor of the artist the American Artists Professional Leagues give the John R. Grabach Ward as a Memorial Award to deserving artists.  In 1953 and 1958 Dell Publishing Company published Grabach’s How to Draw the Human Figure. In 1981 the Graham Gallery of New York City gave the artist a retrospective exhibition “Urban America between the Wars, the art of John R. Grabach.”

Grabach was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, the Salmagundi Club, the American Artists Professional League and other societies.  He was an active exhibitor at the National Academy of Design, the PAFA & the Art Institute of Chicago.

Reference: 1933, A Century of Progress (Art Institute of Chicago); 1980, Mecklanburg, William, John R. Grabach, Seventy Years an Artist; 1984, Leff, Sandra, John R. Grabach, 1880-1981; 1984, Marlor, Clark S., The Society of Independent Artists; 1983, Hills, Patricia, Social Concerns and Urban Realism; Falk, Peter, The Annual Exhibition Records of the National Academy of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; 2002, Hughes, E.M., Artists in California, 1786-1940; Who Was Who in American Art, vol. 1;