Lanier Graham began his curatorial career at New York's Museum of Modern Art. While there he played chess with Duchamp and dedicated his first book Chess Sets (1968) to him. He later served as Curator of the National Gallery of Australia, and Curator of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, where Duchamp had his first museum retrospective in 1963. It was in Pasadena at the NSM in 1991 that Graham used works from the 1963 retrospective as the nucleus for the widely respected exhibition "Impossible Realities: Marcel Duchamp & the Surrealist Tradition."
Graham has published a large number of articles, books, and catalogues on modern art and philosophy, as well as world art and sacred symbolism, including catalogues of the work of Monet, van Gogh, Guimard, Matisse, Ernst, Duchamp, and de Kooning. Among the books he has written are Three Centuries of American Painting (1971 & 1977), The Spontaneous Gensture: Prints & Books of the Abstract Expressionists Era (1987), The Prints of Willem De Kooning: A Catalogue Raisonne (1991), and Goddess in Art (1997), which is now available in four languages.
His research field involves relationships between traditional art and modern art, especially the iconography of the transcendent. He is in the process of completing two books: Mallarme & Modern Art and Images of the Infinite:Spiritual Philosophy in Modern Art which will include his interviews with major figures of the era, including Duchamp. Both books examine Modernism as a secular search for wholeness.
He has taught Art History, Religious Studies, and Museum Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, California Institute of Asian Studies, San Francisco, Naropa Institute, Boulder, and Humboldt State University, Arcata, California. He now teaches Art History at California State University, East Bay, where he also directs the University Art Gallery. His profile appears in Who's Who in America andWho's Who in the World.