Boris Dimitrevich Grigoriev

Boris Grigoriev (1886-1939) Portrait of Patricio Edwards signed 'Boris Grigoriev' (lower right), dated '1928' (lower left) oil on canvas 20 x 12 7/8 in. (51.1 x 32.6 cm.) Our government has signed a contract with a great artist to set up a department of painting. He is a good, talented person who achieved recognition while still young. He looks serious but has a very kind smile. His delicate and nervous manner arouses unbounded sympathy, and anyone meeting and talking to him for the first time will immediately realise that he is talking to a great master. A. Acevado Hernndez, Department of Artistic Education of the Ministry of Public Education September 1928 Boris Grigoriev's time in Chile was prompted by his meeting two years prior at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris with Carlos Isamitt, Director of the Chilean National Academy. Isamitt, an artist himself, was much impressed by Grigoriev's work and on his invitation, the Russian was engaged to teach at the Academy of Arts in Santiago de Chile. While Grigoriev's period of teaching was cut short by the school's unexpected closure at the end of 1928, Grigoriev's legacy was not insignificant: his influence on a subsequent generation of artists is discernible and he is widely viewed as one of Chile's first Avant-Garde artists. The American art critic Charles Brinton said of Grigoriev's work that it is 'feeling, not form, that maintains ascendancy in these vital, invigorating canvases'. That emotion is clearly visible in the mesmerising Portrait of Patricio Edwards that was commissioned from Grigoriev in Chile at the apex of his career. His commission portraits followed on from a slew of success in the United States. Lauded and promoted by Brinton and the influential art dealer James Rosenberg, Grigoriev quickly rose to fame and was immediately embraced by important patrons who began commissioning portraits from him. This painting is a beautiful example of the artist's particular talent for painting children, exemplified in his charming 1917 Girl with a watering can (State Russian Museum, St Petersburg), Portrait of the artist's son (1922, Worcester Art Museum, USA) and Les Enfants (circa 1922, sold Christie's, New York, April 2011 for $1,314,500). There is a depth of feeling conveyed by the staring boy, whose youth and purity is intensified by the sharp contrast between the clarity of his complexion and clothing and the darkness of the background. The psychological undertones felt in both this work and the portrait of his brother, Eugene, is a quintessential characteristic of the artist. These portraits follow the international success of Grigoriev's Rasseia cycle (1919-1921), which looked to the Russian countryside and peasant village life for subject matter and combined his gift for portraiture with a ruthlessly critical eye. There are interesting contrasts between the portraits of the Edward brothers and Grigoriev's 1917 Land of the peasants (State Russian Museum); Patricio Edwards's pose, holding an implement in his hand, echoes that of the young freckled girl in the earlier work. One cannot help but feel an acute disparity in the portrayal of the contented American boys versus that of the Russian peasants during the year of the Russian Revolution.

GRIGORIEV, BORIS Years (1886–1939) Red Army General Oil on canvas, 46 by 61 cm. Comment1 Executed in the 1930s. Provenance: Private collection, Europe. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by the expert I. Vakar. Red Army General , which Boris Grigoriev painted in the 1930s, is now seen as a continuation of his celebrated cycle Visages de Russie , which he had produced a decade earlier in Paris. After that period, Grigoriev worked in Europe and the USA and taught in Latin America – everywhere with a success that was extraordinary for a Russian émigré artist. Wherever he was, even in the 1930s, he never abandoned his Russian theme, supplementing his Visages de Russie cycle with the canvas frieze, Characters from Gogol’’’’s Play “The Government Inspector” (1933–1935), and the present lot, Red Army General . Logically developing the formula that he had devised back in Russia in his cycle Rasseya, Grigoriev endows these late images with a pronounced grotesquerie. Although all the faces in this work were originally based on real prototypes, they have been so expressively distorted under the artist’’’’s hand that they acquire the features of surreal, ghost-like masks. Freed from incidental detail, Grigoriev’’’’s Red Army General becomes a symbol of Soviet Russia as seen from afar: bearing the imprint of Bolshevik terror and degradation. He is one of Alexander Blok’’’’s twelve apostles of the Revolution, standing in the centre of the composition in a red-starred cowl, leading his country towards the new Communist faith. His comrades and brothers-in-arms stand on either side. In the distance we see an edifice resembling something between the bell-tower of the Peter and Paul Cathedral (shrine of the Imperial House of Romanov) and a Kremlin tower, its spire crowned with a red star: a cupola without crosses. Overhead, “their red flag strikes the watchful eye”. Grigoriev significantly enlarges his characters’’’’ faces, placing them against a symbolic background delineated in only a few strokes and lining them up in silent expectation at the very edge of the canvas. Thus the central hero, who bears a distinct resemblance to Mikhail Tukhachevsky, “the red Bonaparte”, and his stiff, lifeless companions appear, on the one hand, isolated from the background, but at the same time, governed by the overall rhythms of the two-dimensional image. The combination of a large-scale foreground configuration (sharply cropped, zoomed-in and fixed, as in a photograph) with a symbolical architectural landscape in the background is a compositional method Grigoriev had been using as early as his portraits of 1916–1917, and which he then used consistently in Rasseya, Visages de Russie and other works of the 1920s. However, in the picture Red Army General , the sombre, Expressionist treatment of the subject, pronounced Primitivism, economy of form and elemental nature of the colour resonances help the artist overcome any repetitiveness when he references his own previously devised images and sculptural forms. The “shadow of Rasseya”, as Alexander Benois so picturesquely put it, was cast over all Grigoriev’’’’s later work, including Red Army General . We can therefore consider this distinctive picture as one of the last Visages de Russie conceived by this artist. Red Army General is a development and in a way, the culmination of the cycle: it embodies, as Gleb Pospelov rightly says, an image of the Motherland that is “if not more joyful, then certainly deeper and more multi-faceted than that of Rasseya ” . Executed in the 1930s.

Boris Grigoriev (1886-1939) Woman in red signed, inscribed and dated in pencil 'à cher madame A. Roméo. Boris Grigoriev Santiago 1936' (on the stretcher) oil on canvas 22 7/8 x 15 in. (58.3 x 38.2 cm.) A gift from the artist to the mother of the present owner in Santiago in 1936. Boris Grigoriev visited Cuba in the spring of 1936. On this expedition around South America the artist also visited Chile, Ecuador and Peru, producing a large series (around 300) of gouaches. This series is both stylistically and thematically comparable to the works he executed on his previous and most extensive South American tour, which took place in 1928-1929. We are grateful to Dr Tamara Galeeva, Senior Lecturer at the Ural State University, Ekaterinburg, for her assistance in cataloguing the present work.

GRIGORIEV, BORIS (1886-1939) Russian Peasant Woman signed, inscribed “Paris” and dated 1923, also further signed, inscribed “à chère Madame Atwater de son ami Boris Grigorieff New York” and numbered “18” on the reverse. Gouache and watercolour on board, 37.5 by 62 cm. Comment1 Provenance: Collection of Adeline Atwater (née Pynchon), USA. Private collection, USA, from c. 1975. Anonymous sale; Russian Paintings and Works of Art , Christie’’ ’’s New York, 18 April 2007, Lot 70. Acquired from the above by the present owner. Private collection, UK. Exhibited: Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev , The New Gallery, New York, 18 November–15 December 1923, No. 19 (label on the reverse). Exhibition of Paintings by Boris Grigoriev , 4 January–3 February 1924, Worcester Art Museum, USA, No. 35. Literature: Exhibition catalogue, Exhibition of Paintings by Boris Grigoriev , Worcester, Worcester Art Museum, 1924, No. 35. Russian Peasant Woman belongs to the cycle Visages de Russie , an incredibly significant part of Boris Grigoriev’’’’s oeuvre which he painted in Paris between 1922 and 1924. It is a logical continuation of the well-known series of pictures and drawings entitled Raseya [an old misspelling of Russia] (1917–1921), begun in Russia and completed after he had emigrated. This picture in particular is based on one of the best pencil drawings in the cycle (the artist was known as a brilliant draughtsman and “magician of line”), which was reproduced in every edition of the accompanying book (Petrograd, 1918; Berlin, 1921; Berlin, 1922). Like all the Raseya drawings of 1917–1918, the young peasant woman in a headscarf was drawn from life, and the portraiture is acutely individual. Grigoriev used the drawing for the central half-length figure of the peasant woman in his 1918 painting Peasant Earth (The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg). Three years later, he introduced the image of the young peasant woman in a headscarf into the group of characters in the eponymous painting from the Visages de Russie cycle (1921, Palace of Congresses, St Petersburg). When Grigoriev painted Russian Peasant Woman in Paris in 1923 he was working intensely on the cycle which, apart from images of peasants, also included a suite of portraits of actors at the Moscow Arts Theatre painted when the company was on tour in Paris. In Russian Peasant Woman he allows the cardboard colour of the support to show through the paint layer, or simply leaves it untouched, thus adding another colour to his palette. In general, however, the palette is bright and sunny, with orange, crimson and pale blue prevailing – all colours that the artist loved. The work is also very typical of this period in Grigoriev’’’’s artistic career by virtue of its slightly Cubist character, which lends sharpness to the Neoclassical forms of his painting. The specific image represented in the painting acquires a certain timelessness and symbolic quality through the spherical perspective. The rounded shapes and lines create a sense of completeness of the earth’’’’s hemisphere, against which background the woman’’’’s head appears powerful and monumental. In the autumn of 1923, the work was shown at Boris Grigoriev’’’’s second solo exhibition in New York ( Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev , The New Gallery, New York, 18 November–15 December, 1923, No. 19 – Russian Peasant Woman ). Afterwards, almost the whole exhibition was shifted to Worcester, where it was shown at the local museum. After the exhibitions the artist gave the painting to Adeline Atwater, director of the New Gallery, who had helped him for many years with the promotion of his work on the American art market. 1923 was a successful year for Grigoriev – he sold seven paintings and ten drawings through the New Gallery (the best figures for any of their represented artists). Dr Tamara Galeeva

* GRIGORIEV, BORIS (Rybinsk 1886 - 1939 Cagnes-sur-Mer) Russian erotic art 1920. Portfolio with 12 lithographs including title page. 7/300. Signed and dated lower right and lower left in stone: Boris Grigoriev (20). Image sizes vary on wove paper 40 x 31.7 cm and 31.7 x 40 cm. Loose sheets in burgundy coloured folder. Label on inside, with information on artist, title and edition. CHF 4 000.- / 5 000.- € 3 290.- / 4 110.- * GRIGORIEV, BORIS (Rybinsk 1886 - 1939 Cagnes-sur-Mer) Russische Erotik. 1920. Portfolio mit 12 Lithographien inkl. Titelblatt. 7/300. Unten rechts bzw. links im Stein signiert und datiert: Boris Grigoriev (20). Darstellungsmasse variierend auf Vélin 40 x 31,7 cm bzw. 31,7 x 40 cm. Lose in burgunder-farbener Mappe. Auf der Innenseite mit Aufkleber, dort mit Künstler-, Titel- und Auflagenangabe. CHF 4 000.- / 5 000.- € 3 290.- / 4 110.-