BORIS DMITRIEVICH GRIGORIEV | THE COOK

David Burliuk, New York

Thence by descent to his granddaughter Mary Burliuk Holt

Sotheby's New York, Russian Art, 15 April 2008, lot 79

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Exhibition catalogue Boris Grigoriev, New York: Lilienfeld Galleries, 1938, no.22 listed as The Cook

Exhibition catalogue 17th International Water Color Exhibition, Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1938, no.95 listed as Antofagasta Pacifique

New York, Lilienfeld Galleries, Boris Grigoriev, 10-29 January 1938, no.22

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 17th International Water Color Exhibition, 28 April - 30 May 1938, no.95

The present work belongs to a series of around 300 gouaches created during the artist’s two trips to Chile in 1928-1929 and 1936-1937. His reputation preceding him, Grigoriev and his wife were invited by the Chilean government to teach at the Academy of Arts in Santiago in 1928. That same year, a retrospective of Grigoriev’s paintings, held at the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts, was extremely well received with critics praising the artist’s incredible plasticity and expressiveness. The few years he spent teaching and painting in Chile were to have a profound influence on the Chilean avant-garde and inspire such artists as Camilo Mori (1896-1973) and Maria Tupper (1898-1965).

Painted in Antofagasta, a port city in Northern Chile 700 miles from Santiago, the present composition dates from the artist’s second trip to Latin America. Two years after Grigoriev’s return to the USA the work was exhibited at the 1938 Lilienfeld Galleries exhibition in New York and later that same year at the 17^th Water Color Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Critics compared the South American works exhibited in his New York solo exhibition to the works of Raoul Dufy and marvelled: ‘where is the painter of The Brothers Karamazov? Where is the dirtiness of Gorky’s face? Where is the stiffness of the Faces of Russia? We cannot find them anymore, we can see a very different Grigoriev, different and new’ (L.Kamyshnikov, ‘Neugomonnaya dusha: Na vystavke khudozhnika Borisa Grigorieva’, Novoe russkoe slovo, New York, 1938).