its lower cost of living, and continued to live there on and off. Wellman and Graham separated in August 1942, dividing their assets equally. Wellman initiated subsequent divorce proceedings, on the grounds of "extreme mental cruelty" committed by Graham. The divorce was finalized in the state of Nevada on July 16, 1945. During the 1940s Graham married for the fifth time, to Marianne Schapira Strate. She had a grown daughter, Ileana Sonnabend, who was then married to Leo Castelli. They both became influential in the New York art world and were known as independent gallery owners and dealers. Graham served as a mentor to younger artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky. He introduced Ileana and Leo Castelli to his artist friends in the New York art world. He was also considered influential to Lee Krasner (Pollock's wife and an artist in her own right), David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, and Mark Rothko. Graham claimed to have befriended Picasso and many other important European modernists while living in Paris and in Russia. He often entertained and lectured the younger American artists in New York City about modernist ideas. He was frequently the bearer of radical new insights into art and creativity. In 1942 Graham curated a group show at the McMillan Gallery that exhibited work by Jackson Pollock (in his first exhibition in New York City), Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Stuart Davis. He showed them with work by well-established European artists: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Pierre Bonnard, and Amedeo Modigliani. Along with Stuart Davis and Hans Hofmann, Graham is considered a mentor for the younger American artists above, who comprised many of the Abstract expressionist generation of American painters and sculptors. He was the author of System and Dialectics of Art (1937), a treatise on art, modernism and the avant-garde. It was an enormously influential text during the 1940s and supported the modernist movement. During this period and into the 1950s, Graham also continued to paint, developing a "unique figurative style" derived from classical forms; he was especially influenced by the works of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolas Poussin, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. He signed these paintings with "Ioannus", the Latin form of John and Ivan. Among his first works in this style were paintings and drawings of Russian soldiers completed about 1943, drawn from his own experience in the imperial army during World