Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev

Acquired by the parents of the present owner from the artist's son, Kirill Grigoriev

Paris, La Renaissance Gallery, L'exposition d'Art Russe, 1932, No.107
New York, Marie Sterner Gallery, Palntings and Watercolours by Boris Grigoriev, 17-19 April 1933, No.6
New York, Academy of Allied Arts, Boris Grigoriev 1920-1935, 21 November - 21 December 1935, No.13
Cagnes Sur Mer, Chateau-musée de Cagnes-sur-Mer, Hommage a Boris Grigorieff 1887-1939, 1979, No.14

S.Rachmaninov, Literaturnoe nasledie, vol II, Pis'ma, Moscow 1980, p.529

Original canvas. The paint surface is clean with a few lines of craquelure in places. UV light reveals minor spots of retouching to the background and the sitter as well as above the bottom inner frame edge. UV light reveals a fluorescing varnish, which appears to have run, or dribbled in the lower portion of the composition. Held in a gold painted wood frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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For Boris Grigoriev portraiture was one of the most important forms of painting. He was always drawn to unusual, creative people – artists, writers, poets, actors, directors and musicians. In his portrayal of them Grigoriev reveals something essential and enduring, while at the same time intensifying and exaggerating the characteristic features both of the subjects' external appearance and their internal existence. Nevertheless, his favourite models were always members of his own family: his wife Elizaveta (1883-1968) and especially his son Kirill (1915-2001), whom he painted many times, starting in the first months of his life. Kirill's face is easily recognisable in the figure of the sleeping baby in A Peasant Family, from the cycle Raseya (1917, Russian State Museum, Saint Petersburg), and in the final illustration in the book Visages de Russie (Paris, 1923). Grigoriev's compositions Child of the World (1920) and Portrait of My Son (Worcester Art Museum), which was also painted in Normandy in 1921, were shown at many exhibitions in Europe and America.

 

The portrait of Kirill Grigoriev at auction here is one of the artist's best. It was painted during the Depression, a difficult time for the artist, when he barely left his house in Cagnes-sur-Mer, in the south of France. The portrait was produced in the summer of 1931, at the same time as a portrait of the Russian composer Rachmaninoff. In a letter to the composer, dated 12 September 1931, Grigoriev described the difficult conditions in which both works were created: 'I am not even sure whether I will be able to go to Paris this autumn to exhibit in the "Salon d'automne". All my frames and everything I need for exhibitions are in my studio at 100 Rue de la Tour, which I am expending every effort to keep. I was intending to show two portraits this year: yours and one of my son. I have been at the easel practically all summer working on these two works and have put all my love into them. But they are very different: the quiet, classical form and the amber tones of a tanned youth and the wildly creative atmosphere of your canvas, filled with musical thunder...' (Rachmaninov, Literaturnoe nasledie, vol II, Pis'ma, Moscow 1980, p.529)

 

The peaceful and balanced style of the portrait and the almost illusionist devices used to construct the spaces within it, as well as the strange 'constriction' of the half-figure of the sixteen-year-old boy between the foreground and the background of the composition (respectively, the drapery thrown onto the frame and the projecting beam of the window-ledge), show the artist's attachment to the traditions of early Dutch portraiture. This contrasts sharply with the portrait of Rachmaninoff, in which the expressive and fantastic 'landscape' of the composer's face creates a unique 'panorama of the soul' of the subject (J. de Vignes-Rouges, Oeuvres nouvelles de Boris Grigoriev, L'Art et les Artistes, Paris, 1930, p. 319).

We are grateful to Tamara Galeeva, senior lecturer at the Ural State University, Ekaterinburg for providing this note.