A pivotal figure in the New York art scene during the mid-twentieth century, Graham was not only an artist but also an influential collector and champion of modern art. Born in Kyiv to an aristocratic family, Graham arrived in New York in 1920, where he trained under Ashcan School artist John Sloan at the Art Students League. By 1929 and through the 1930s, Graham primarily painted in an abstract Cubist style. During this period, he befriended artists Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and Willem de Kooning, among others, and supported their work. He frequently traveled to Paris and had connections with many artists working there, serving as a crucial link between the European and American avant-garde. Table Top Still Life with Bird epitomizes the Cubist abstract style that sparked John Graham's close association with the renowned art collector and patron Duncan Phillips. From about 1928 to 1930, Phillips granted Graham a $200 stipend in exchange for his choice of paintings. In 1929, the same year Graham executed the present painting, Phillips organized the artist's first American solo exhibition.

Although Graham himself opposed literal interpretations of his work, there is nonetheless a notable presence of egg images in his work from 1925–30, suggesting that the painter instilled profound meaning in them. Art historian and curator William C. Agee highlighted the significance of the egg in Graham's work, noting that it served as a point of focus and reference, providing symmetry and balance to the paintings. In his essay accompanying the important recent exhibition American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, and Their Circle, 1927-1942, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, which included Table Top Still Life with Bird, Agee noted, "In his writings on art, Graham always insisted on the need for clarity in one's paintings; the egg and the oval give just that, a clear, clean shape for the eye, and for other elements in the painting, to revolve around." [1] Revolve around the egg they do in Table Top Still Life with Bird, where the immense egg dominates the painting.

In discussing the group of pictures to which the current painting belongs, Agee notes, "It is as if Graham was carrying out a tour de force of painterly skill while showing his embrace and mastery of both an abstract and representational vocabulary." [2] Graham's use of Cubist techniques, such as exaggerating and reversing the expected size and placement of forms, demonstrated his innovative approach to creating compositions that challenged conventional perspectives while remaining rooted in recognizable objects. Although the appearance of the egg in Graham's art waned by the mid-1930s, it was adopted by de Kooning as the basis for much of his increasingly abstract work in the following decades.

[1] William C. Agee, "Graham, Gorky, De Kooning: A New Classicism, an Alternate Modernism," in American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, and Their Circle, 1927-1942, Andover and New Haven: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy and Yale University Press, 2011, p. 126

[2] Agee, p. 130