Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev

Private collection, Connecticut
Zorin collection
Present owner

New York, The New Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev, November-December, 1923
Worcester, Worcester Art Museum, Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev, January-February, 1924
New York, Grand Central Palace, The Russian Art Exhibition, March-April, 1924
Paris, Hotel de Jean Charpentier, Oeuvres de Boris Grigoriev, October, 1925
Santiago, Sala Chile, Museo de Bellas Artes, Boris Grigorieff Exposicion, 1928
New York, Academy of Allied Arts, Boris Grigoriev, 1920-1935, 1935

The New Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev, New York, 1923, no. 34, illustrated
Worcester Art Museum, Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev, Worcester, 1924, no. 2
Grand Central Palace, The Russian Art Exhibition, New York, 1924, no. 215 
Hotel de Jean Charpentier, Oeuvres de Boris Grigoriev, Paris, 1925, no. 21
Museo de Bellas Artes, Boris Grigorieff Exposicion, Santiago, 1928, no. 24
Academy of Allied Arts, Boris Grigoriev, 1920-1935, New York, 1935, no. 28
Perezvoni, Riga, 1929, vol. 42, p. 1343, illustrated

While living in France in the early 1920s, Boris Grigoriev worked tirelessly on his Faces of Russia cycle--an extension of his earlier Rasseia portraiture. These portraits depict the Russian people, particularly the peasantry, in a uniquely harsh light, revealing them as grotesque caricatures that one might expect from Dostoevsky or Gogol. Deceptively strange, these caricatures are in fact charged with universal human traits, luring the unwitting viewer into the subject's psyche, where perpetual suffering is at odds with a fierce desire to persevere.

Grigoriev summered in Brittany during the early 1920s, and there he created a comparable Breton cycle, depicting fishermen, their wives, children and the elderly. It was a widely accepted notion that the pious Breton people had escaped the evils of modernity, existing rather as a sacred vessel of primitive traditions. Grigoriev undoubtedly found similarities between the Breton peasants and the Russian peasants, and his Breton cycle confirms it, for he painted them with the same rugged faces and expressive eyes, capturing the essence of their common spirit.

In Fisherman, Grigoriev portrays a Breton holding a crab, denoting the man's communal role as well as his means of survival. The analogy between man and crab runs deeper, for Grigoriev paints them with the same colors, and the man's hands are likened to the crab's claws. The viewer comes to understand that the Breton's shell--his weathered skin and stoic eyes--is a testament to the resolute strength that lies within.

By 1923, Grigoriev sent Fisherman to America where it was hung in a number of important exhibitions, including Christian Brinton and Igor Grabar's Russian Art Exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in 1924.