Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev

Mrs. Josephine B. Crane, Dalton, Massachusetts
Acquired as a gift from the above in 1948

New York, The New Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev, Nov-Dec, 1923, no. 30
Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum, Exhibition of Paintings by Boris Grigoriev, Jan-Feb 1924, no. 24

Tamara Galeeva, Grigoriev, St. Petersburg, 2007, p. 207

This painting has most likely never been removed from its original stretcher and is in original condition. The canvas is distorted here and there because of the differing thickness of paint; the original stretcher is not expandable. Unless the stretcher is changed and the canvas relaxed, proper tightening of this picture affecting a more attractive surface, will not be possible. The picture is viewable as is. It is slightly dirty, yet not noticeably so and there is no paint loss or damage. At some point the canvas will need to be relaxed, the current stretcher may possibly be reused, yet this is not guaranteed. The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Man with Pipe is a compelling portrait from Grigoriev's Visages du Monde (Faces of the World) cycle. Like Binious (Pipe Players), Man with Pipe is prominently reiterated in the artist's large-scale Visages du Monde of 1920-1931, and thus the picture may be considered one of the strongest and most significant of his French period.

Possibly at the encouragement of his good friend Alexandre Benois, Grigoriev visited Brittany for the first time in 1914. This brief stay had a profound effect on his oeuvre, as illustrated in a series of related works dated that same year which are conserved at the State Russian Museum and The State Tretyakov Gallery. Grigoriev returned to France several times before 1917, and he elected to spend his summer there in 1921. It was the first of many summers that he and his family would pass in Normandy and Britanny, where the artist worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day and created a significant number of paintings. On October 1, 1922, the same year he executed the present lot, Grigoriev wrote to fellow artist Sergei Soudeikine, "This summer I worked ten hours a day, systematically, for two and a half months. I completed nine works and I think you will be impressed. My ministers, who have lived with me this summer, were astounded" (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, f. 947, op. 1, ed. khr. 188).

Physically, Grigoriev left Russia in 1918, but the Rasseia portraits he executed over the following years proved that images of the peasantry still haunted his memory. Upon arriving in France, he was most captivated by the residents of Normandy and Brittany, so much so that he began a new cycle of peasant portraits, all of which underscored their commonality with the Russian peasant. They were rugged, pious and secluded, and he wanted to explore the source of their very existence, the spirit that allowed them to persevere through the ages. It was at this time that Grigoriev began to refer to his portraits as Liki (in Russian) or Visages—words with significant religious overtones that emphasize the similarity between the faces he depicted and religious icons. He would later use the term Visages du Monde as an all-encompassing title for his portraiture outside Russia, thereby underscoring the universality of the "primitive" human soul that he depicted.

Grigoriev painted Man with Pipe in Normandy, and it is highly representative of his portraits from this period. For example, he often depicted his French subjects making gestures with their hands or holding significant objects—pipe, jug, crab, child—to represent their communal role and create a story out of imagery, like symbols found in icons. Meanwhile, he was drawn to the aesthetics of traditional peasant clothing, and he accurately represented his French subjects wearing their appropriate regional costume. Perhaps most compellingly, he painted faces with neutral, sometimes paradoxical expressions, their eyes at once emotive and emotionless. An advertisement in the German cultural newspaper Der Querschnitt commented on Grigoriev's approach, underscoring a multitude of contrasts that the viewer might encounter, "Heavy as the earth itself, almost rude are his works, though they show a technical control and refinement. [Grigoriev's] work is penetrated by the serious and cheerful, the sensitive and atrocious, the instinctive elementary" (June, No. 5, 1925). In fact, his French canvases were a tremendous success, bringing forth appreciation and respect from an international public; for example, one French critic tellingly proclaimed Grigoriev to be "a psychologist, an investigator of the faces of sorrow, the bestial bluntness of his unfortunate and magnificent country" (L. Vauxcelles, L'Amour de l'Art, 1921).

After working in Normandy and Brittany during the summers of 1922 and 1923, Grigoriev exhibited his resulting paintings and designs at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. While in Brittany during the following year, he worked on an album of his Visages du Monde with fifty reproductions, most likely including the present lot. Unfortunately this project was never realized, for he was juggling far too many projects at the time, and instead the patchwork composition of the large-scale painting Visages du Monde became the summation of these crucial and transitional years of his career.

Man with Pipe was once alternately titled The Grandfather, as it is inscribed on the frame. Additionally, the archives of the Frick Art Reference Library contain a photograph of Man with Pipe which was donated by scholar and art collector George S. Hellman of New York in 1940. In light of Mr. Hellman's known interest in Russian émigré art in the 1920s and 30s, it seems quite plausible that he owned Man with Pipe before it was acquired by Mrs. Josephine B. Crane and gifted to the Berkshire Museum.