It is perhaps revelatory of Grabach's personality that seems to have been intentionally misleading in such details of his early like as he gave out. In completing the Academy's biographical questionnaire, following his election as Associate, he stated that he had been born in Greenfield on March 2, 1896. That year-date clearly proves inaccurate. In a lengthy outline of Grabach's biography published in 1964, Henry Gasser, who was director of the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art when Grabach taught there, also gave the scene of his birth and childhood as Greenfield, and his arrival in Newark as occurring when he was about twelve years old. Other points in Gasser's article are demonstrably inaccurate, however. Virginia Mecklenburg's research for the 1980 retrospetive exhibition on Grabach, organized by the National Collection of Fine Arts, determined that he had no association with Greenfield until he was twenty-two years old.
It does seem reliable, however, that Grabach studied at the Art Students League, New York, under George Bridgeman, Kenyon Cox, and Frank Vincent DuMond, from 1904 to 1912, and that throughout this period of study he earned his living as a designer and die-cutter for several New Jersey-based silverware manufacturers.
From 1912 to 1915 he was in Greenfield, where he could continue to support himself by working as a designer for the Rogers, Lunt, and Bowlen Company, while beginning independent work as a painter. In this period his favored subject was landscape, rendered in an Impressionist style. On his return to the New York-New Jersey area, he became drawn to the lower class, grittier urban scene which had similarly attracted John Sloan and George Bellows. Grabach, while not connected to these artists, demonstrated an awareness and admiration for their work in his own. Late in the 1920s his interests began to focus on the plight of the people who previously had been only part of his fairly decorative view of the urban landscape. Figures became prominent in his compositions, and their theme became strongly socialist. He worked with these politically inspired motifs for about a decade; in later years he returned to landscape and urban scenes. Also in later years, and certainly after his election as Academician, Grabach was much given to repainting his earlier canvases--and resigning them with the addition of "N. A."
Grabach first exhibited at the Academy in the winter exhibition of 1913, and showed again in 1914 and 1915. He was then sporadically represented in annual exhibitions until 1962, which began an unbroken sequence of appearances of his paintings in Academy annuals to his death. Grabach's first one-man exhibition was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1928; it was in the Art Institute's 1924 juried exhibition that he had received his first significant award. Other major awards were conveyed by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1927, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., in 1932; New Jersey selected one of his paintings to be the State's official representation in the IBM pavilion exhibition at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The period of Grabach's celebrity is essentially bracketed by these marks of recognition. While he would receive other awards and honors, none would be of the national prestige of these. Grabach continued to work through most of his long life, but his isolation from the New York art scene which he nurtured after his move to Irvington in 1924, and his devotion to teaching, along with the general turn of critical attention away from contemporary realist artists, left the remainder of his career in relative obscurity.
Grabach began teaching in 1932, giving classes in life drawing at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art; from 1962 to 1966 he taught at the Sloan School, in South Orange, New Jersey, and in 1967 began teaching at Heritage Arts, also in South Orange. He remained active as a teacher to the year of his death. His How to Draw the Human Figure, 1957, has remained a standard guide to academic technique.
