Cave Canem

John Grahams Cave Canem from 1944 takes its title from the Latin phrase meaning beware of the dog, an inscription found on mosaics at the entrance of ancient Roman houses that served as both a warning and a jest, and the painting embodies the artists characteristic combination of classical erudition and modernist experimentation. Graham, who was deeply read in classical literature, esoteric philosophy, and modern art theory, produced paintings that operate on multiple levels of reference simultaneously, and Cave Canem is no exception: the title suggests both a literal warning and a metaphorical one, the dog as guardian of the threshold between the known and the unknown. The year 1944 places this painting in the period when Graham was moving away from the geometric abstraction of his earlier work toward a more figural and symbolic mode that drew on classical mythology, Renaissance proportion systems, and esoteric symbolism. The oil on canvas medium, applied with Grahams characteristically deliberate brushwork, creates a surface that combines the chromatic richness of European tradition with the formal ambiguity that connects his work to the Abstract Expressionism then emerging in New York. Cave Canem is a key work in Grahams transition from abstraction to the figurative and symbolic painting of his later career, a transition that alienated some of his former admirers but that now appears as one of the most prescient moves in the history of American painting, anticipating the return to figuration that would occur in the 1960s and beyond.

Grahams Cave Canem exemplifies the combination of classical erudition and modernist experimentation that makes him one of the most intellectually ambitious painters of the 20th century. His transition from abstraction to symbolic figuration in the 1940s anticipated later developments in American art and demonstrated that modernism could accommodate classical and esoteric subject matter.

An oil painting by Graham titled after the Roman warning Cave Canem, combining classical erudition with modernist experimentation in a transitional work from geometric abstraction to symbolic figuration that anticipated the return to figuration in American art.