Debunking a Myth of Solitary American Artists.

When American painting became famous in the 1950s, it arrived with a certain narrative attached to it. The canvases were big and abstract, and photographs and writing from the period implied that they were made by solitary, heroic figures who approached their work with native-born American zeal, and who, despite their talent and energy, weren't particularly literate. A different story is told in ''American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning and Their Circle, 1927-1942'' at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase. This version of American art history features smaller canvases and figures like John Graham (1881-1961), who was born Ivan Dombrowski in Kiev, the son of minor Polish aristocrats. But the show also rebuts the notion of the United States before the '40s or '50s as an artistic backwater. As Irving Sandler, one of the curators and a longtime scholar and champion of the New York School, wrote in the catalog: ''The 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression, is often looked down upon as a barren period in American art. It was not.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]