No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that the others are behind the time.

Graham rejects the romantic cliché that great artists “arrive too early” for their era. In her view, an artist’s work is inseparable from the conditions that produced it—its politics, aesthetics, technologies, and social tensions—so the artist is not ahead of time but an acute expression of it. The sense of “ahead” arises when audiences, institutions, or fellow artists lag in perception, taste, or courage, failing to recognize what the present moment is already making possible. The remark also defends modernism’s shocks and ruptures: what seems incomprehensible may be the most truthful articulation of contemporary life, with reception catching up only later.