Martha Graham, a prime revolutionary in the arts of this century and the American dancer and choreographer whose name became synonymous with modern dance, died yesterday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96 years old. Miss Graham died of cardiac arrest after being treated for two months for pneumonia, said Ron Protas, general director of the Martha Graham Dance Company. Miss Graham had become ill in December after a 55-day tour of the Far East with her troupe. She entered the hospital on Jan. 15 and returned home two weeks ago. Frequently ranked with Picasso, Stravinsky and James Joyce for developing a form of expression that broke the traditional mold, Miss Graham was initially acclaimed as a great dancer. Yet ultimately her genius -- universally recognized as she became the most honored figure in American dance -- was embodied in her choreographic masterworks and her invention of a new and codified dance language. The Graham technique, which is now used by dance companies throughout the world, became the first enduring alternative to the idiom of classical ballet. Powerful, dynamic, jagged and filled with tension, this vocabulary combined with Miss Graham's distinctive system of training to set her above other dance innovators. Although such achievements were part of Miss Graham's multi-faceted pioneering role in helping to establish modern dance outside the older ballet tradition after the 1920's, she continued to amaze her public for more than 60 years. She choreographed more than 180 works. The most recent was her self-mocking "Maple Leaf Rag," which had its premiere on Oct. 2 with the Martha Graham Dance Company in New York. Throughout her career, Miss Graham's fundamental tenet was that dance should reach audiences through a visceral response rather than an objective image that registered upon the intellect. "Out of emotion comes form," she said, and then proved that out of form she could re-create the same emotion onstage. She never wavered in her belief that movement could express inner feeling. Miss Graham sought to give "visible substance to things felt" and to "chart the graph of the heart." These celebrated Graham phrases became the metaphors central to her art. Miss Graham's dances spoke eloquently against the crushing of the human spirit, and one of her frequent themes was the condemnation of intolerance, especially toward nonconformists. Her own life as a creative artist epitomized the independent spirit with which she so frequently imbued her dramatic heroines. The figure conquering sexual fear in "Errand Into the Maze," the woman looking deep into herself while preparing for an unnamed fate in "Herodiade" and the American pioneer brimming with optimism in "Frontier" could also be Clytemnestra or Jocasta, antiquity's queens who -- in the Graham canon -- emerged from crisis through the sheer force of self-understanding. Miss Graham usually cast herself at the center of these works until 1969, when she gave her last performance and retired reluctantly from the stage at the age of 75. Because she rarely met conventional expectations about dance, she was both misunderstood and acclaimed. She was surrounded by debate throughout her career; few remained indifferent to her. Acknowledgment of Miss Graham's role as a dominant force in all the arts at first came from painters, writers, musicians and the acting profession. Gregory Peck and Bette Davis were among the many drama students she taught over the years at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Eleanor Roosevelt invited Miss Graham to perform at the White House in 1937, and in 1976 Miss Graham became the first dance personality to receive, from President Gerald R. Ford, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor. Nonetheless, Miss Graham's highly intense dancing and choreography were not intended to soothe the spirit and did not find ready acceptance. Like Picasso, she was concerned with an inner reality. "For me, dance is theater," she wrote. But she never resorted to a realistic theater. More often than not, her choreography presented a dancer's body as distorted or dislocated, an assemblage of forms aligned into maximum expressiveness. Audiences throughout the world were often disturbed by Miss Graham's frank acknowledgment of human sexuality, especially in her famous cycle inspired by Greek myths. Miss Graham's Medea, Jocasta, Phaedra and Clytemnestra gave vent to their lust and hate, baring the passions that few humans liked to recognize in themselves but that Miss Graham exposed with the unflinching scrutiny of a 20th-century Jungian analyst. For Miss Graham, dance became a collective memory that could communicate the emotions universal to all civilizations: mythology, she felt, was the psychology of the ancients. Miss Graham's encyclopedic approach to dance -- a creative wellspring from sources as varied as American Indian rituals to the Bible -- often carried several levels of meaning and startled a public that defined dance in linear or pictorial terms. Miss Graham, for her part, said she wanted her dances to be "felt" rather than comprehended in the usual manner. In 1944, John Martin, dance critic for The New York Times, wrote of the emotional effect that the Graham dance theater could have upon the viewer. He warned that "Deaths and Entrances," the choreographer's study of turbulent passions inspired by Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, the 19th-century English writers, was "un-understandable through the usual organs of understanding" and "slips in through sensory perceptions." In general, Miss Graham saw art as a reflection of its time inseparable from life. "My dancing," she said, "is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement." Even the dance technique that she hammered out on her own body and then transferred to her school and company derived from the most organic aspect of human life: the act of breathing. That act was formalized and dramatized in the idiom's most basic principle, called contraction and release -- intensified moments of exhalation and inhalation. Miss Graham said her aim was "to increase the emotional activity of the dancer's body so that you are teaching the body, not teaching the mind." The contraction, originating in the dancer's pelvis, created the percussive angular movement and sexual tension that invariably startled a newcomer to the Graham repertory. But it is the Graham idiom as a whole that can look strange to those who expect more of a continuum in dancing. Above all, she said, "Dance is not representational." Miss Graham recalled in later years that as a young dancer about to embark upon an independent career in 1922, she had chanced upon a nonfigurative painting by Wassily Kandinsky -- a slash of red against a field of blue. "I will dance like that," she said. Like other modernists, Miss Graham rejected literal imagery in favor of abstraction. Form for form's sake, however, held no interest for her. Instead she focused on abstraction in its strict sense, that of extracting the essence of a quality of emotion. A celebrated example was "Lamentation," the 1930 solo in which Miss Graham, encased in a tube of stretch jersey, created sharply angular shapes on a bench. She did not dance about grief, but sought to be what she called "the thing itself" or the embodiment of grief. Miss Graham's gift for the distilled image ranged over her entire career. In "Cave of the Heart" (1946), her Medea was the personification of hate, consumed by the venom of jealousy as visualized in snakelike contours. The quintessential Graham could be found in "Frontier" (1935), one of the choreographer's pieces on overt American themes. The solo initiated her 32-year collaboration with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The set for "Frontier" was a fragment of a fence seemingly anchored by a rope behind. It had the same spareness and economy of Miss Graham's solo and the score of her music director and mentor of that time, Louis Horst. Noguchi noted in general that he had found in Miss Graham "a drive that motivated her to strip the dance to its stark rudiment." Both artists shared an affinity for forms that looked abstract and were resonant with multiple meanings. Writing in 1984, Noguchi said that for "Frontier" he had "thought to catch the essential sculpture of space -- a limitless illusion." He continued: "This is the path I continued to investigate whenever Martha would call on me to rise to the occasion. She is the one who always came to me with her requirements and the myth she wished to encompass. My role was to respond." Miss Graham's work revealed an integrated vision. She began using contemporary scores for the company she formed in 1929. After 1934, she tended to use commissioned music and was guided here by Horst, a composer who insisted that dance had a life independent of music and did not derive from it. Miss Graham herself, sometimes accused of using dance as mere aural decor, often said that she did not seek to interpret another art form -- that is, music. Among the composers who wrote scores for Miss Graham were Samuel Barber, William Schuman, Gian Carlo Menotti and Aaron Copland, whose score for her 1944 classic, "Appalachian Spring," won the Pulitzer Prize. Martha Graham, the eldest of three daughters, was born on May 11, 1894, in Allegheny, Pa., to George Graham, a physician who specialized in mental disorders, and the former Jane (Jenny) Beers, a descendant of Miles Standish. In 1908, the family moved to Santa Barbara, Calif. In 1916, after the death of her father and after graduation from a junior college, the Cumnock School, Miss Graham enrolled in the Denishawn school in Los Angeles and then joined the Denishawn Company. Denishawn, organized by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, was then the only major dance company that worked outside the classical ballet tradition, and it became the incubating ground for such pioneering talents as Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and Miss Graham herself. John Murray Anderson saw Miss Graham with Denishawn and hired her for his Greenwich Village Follies in 1923 and 1924. But in those two years Miss Graham realized that neither Denishawn, with its exotic pretexts for dances, nor the commercial theater was right for her. At the invitation of Rouben Mamoulian, she joined the dance division of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, where she taught dance. On April 18, 1926, she made her concert debut at the 48th Street Theater in New York with works that still showed the influence of Denishawn. "The idiom," the critic Robert Sabin recalled in 1953, "was still prevalently romantic and eclectic, but the spirit was new and as bracing as a salty sea wind." Miss Graham taught in the early years in her studio at 66 Fifth Avenue, near 13th Street, and at the Neighborhood Playhouse. She assembled a company of women. Because the members had to support themselves, they would work on new works for nine months, then give a few recitals in New York and go on tour. From her group, augmented by men in 1938 to 1939, came the next generation of modern dancers, choreographers and teachers: Anna Sokolow, Sophie Maslow, Pearl Lang, May O'Donnell, Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham and later Paul Taylor and John Butler. Miss Graham, who had a long-term relationship with Horst, was married in 1948 to Mr. Hawkins. They separated in the early 1950's and were later divorced. Before World War II, Miss Graham took on outside assignments. In 1930, she was the Chosen One in Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski and choreographed by Leonide Massine. A few years later she collaborated on dramatic productions with Blanche Yurka, Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic, and Archibald MacLeish. Troubled by the recurring financial problems that were endemic to an art form struggling for acceptance, Miss Graham was helped over the years by individual patrons. Among them were Frances Steloff, founder of the Gotham Book Mart, whose $1,000 loan made the initial 1926 concert possible, Miss Cornell, Bethsabee de Rothschild, Lila Acheson Wallace and, most recently, Halston. Mrs. Wallace made it possible for the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance to acquire the building at 316 East 63d Street, where the Graham school is situated. In the early years, Miss Graham costumed herself and the women in her troupe in stretch jersey. She later referred to this time as her "long woolens" period. Her dances were spare and stark, testimony to her deep interest in ritual, and she was strongly influenced by the ceremonial Indian dances she had witnessed in the Southwest. These experiences were reflected in such works as "Primitive Mysteries" and "El Penitente," which remain in her company's repertory. In the 1930's, Miss Graham was known for her American themes. "We must look to America to bring forth an art as powerful as America itself," she said, and produced such works as "American Document," "American Provincials," "Appalachian Spring," "Letter to the World" and "Salem Shore." After 1946, she immersed herself in Hebrew and Greek mythology with "Cave of the Heart," "Night Journey," "Errand Into the Maze," "Judith," "The Witch of Endor," "Phaedra" and, most powerfully, the full-evening "Clytemnestra" of 1958. She picked up historical personages with legendary qualities, the Bronte sisters for "Deaths and Entrances" and Joan of Arc for "Seraphic Dialogue." As the years progressed, Miss Graham was loath to leave the stage. Since she was the central figure on that stage, she eventually began to create roles for herself that were less physically demanding. After her retirement from dancing, her new works rarely focused on a protagonist. Repeatedly acclaimed as a choreographer, she always considered herself a dancer first. After relinquishing her roles to younger dancers, she continued to direct her company. She made triumphant tours to the Far East and Europe under Government auspices and, in her 80's and 90's, increasingly traveled abroad with her company. Her tour last fall took in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong. It was on a European trip in 1962 that she ran afoul of two United States Representatives, Edna Kelly of Brooklyn and Peter Frelinghuysen of New Jersey. They saw "Phaedra" in Bonn and, apparently not knowing the Greek legend of a queen's passion for her stepson, protested that the work was too explicit to be a proper cultural export for the United States. Although Miss Graham was identified with a new art form that initially rejected classical ballet as being inadequate for contemporary expression, she collaborated with ballet's leading personalities. In 1959, the New York City Ballet presented "Episodes," consisting of two sections to Webern's music. George Balanchine choreographed one half and Miss Graham the other. In 1975, just before Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev appeared as guests in her company, she declared, "The war has ended," alluding to the perceived conflict between modern dance and ballet. Further proof came when Mikhail Baryshnikov appeared as a guest with her troupe from 1987 to 1989. Among Miss Graham's awards were the first Guggenheim Fellowship given to a dancer; the Kennedy Center Honors; the Aspen Award in the Humanities; the Capezio Dance Award; the first Samuel H. Scripps-American Dance Festival Award to honor achievement in modern dance; the Meadows Award in the performing arts; the Handel Medallion of New York City; the Henry Hadley medal for contribution to American music, and the first National Medal of Arts. In 1987, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark gave Miss Graham the Ingenio et Arti medal, a rarely awarded honor and her country's highest distinction for contributions to the arts and sciences. Jack Lang, the French Minister of Culture, personally decorated her in 1984 with the Legion of Honor at the Paris Opera. She received a number of honorary degrees, from Yale, Harvard and other universities. Miss Graham liked to emphasize that her work and private life were separate. "I have always fought against any dramatization of my peculiarities or my personality," she said. Writing for The New York Times, Thomas Lask noted it was through her work "that she had, in William Faulkner's apt phrase, put a scratch on the face of eternity." Martha Graham was living proof of her own adage: "No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the time." Miss Graham leaves no immediate survivors.