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Future Exhibitions Current Exhibitions Back to Exhibitions Back to Graham Williford's America )
Graham Devoe Williford, circa 1999. Photo courtesy The Graham Williford Foundation for American Art.
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Graham Williford's America January 27–May 11, 2008 Biography of Graham Devoe Williford Born on Feb. 22, 1926 and raised in the Freestone County seat of Fairfield, Texas, Williford cultivated his passion for education among his family of rural East Texas farmers, merchants and teachers. Often believing he had been "born out of his time" by 100 years, he began a lifelong fascination with the culture, literature, language and arts of the 19th century as a young man. Though he completed a degree in art history from Columbia University shortly after his discharge from the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II, it was during his studies in Paris to become a concert pianist that his attention would focus squarely on the American artists of his favorite period in history. Particularly fond of artists of the American expatriate school in Europe, Williford was a determined scholar and collector who "went on the offensive" in locating his favorite pieces by the artists who had fascinated him in his research – often seeking out the artists' heirs in his zeal for acquiring their works. He benefited from the muted enthusiasm and depleted market for 19th- and 20th-century American art in the late 1950s and early '60s, and often was able to procure pieces by once-influential artists for only a few hundred dollars – works which, due in large part to his research and collecting efforts over the subsequent years, now are valued at up to $500,000. "Graham would track people down, find their family members, go through garages, attics ... whatever it took to find these paintings," recalls John Williford, Graham's second cousin. "He had a life's passion, and he pursued it." The younger Williford described his erudite, eccentric cousin as a man with a gregarious sense of humor who never left home without his signature fedora and was always immaculately dressed – "very much a country gentleman, landowner type," he said of Graham, a lifelong bachelor. "He was old school and he wasn't going to change. He liked it that way." In addition to the Federal Reserve, Williford's paintings eventually would be displayed in venues including the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Dallas Museum of Art, which showcased pieces from his collection in the 2006 exhibition There and Back Again. Shortly before his death, the savvy collector and expert on American art saw a culmination of his life's work when one of his paintings by Dennis Miller Bunker was displayed in the Americans in Paris 1860–1900 exhibition at the National Gallery in London. "He said, 'I guess I finally arrived if I've got a picture in the National Gallery,'" said John Williford, who accompanied Graham on his final trip abroad. "Graham sort of wistfully said, 'I only wish my mother were here to see this.'" "The type of paintings Graham collected now are in every museum collection," Ms. Goley said. "A lot of these museums would like to have back the pieces they sold in the '50s." |