BORIS GRIGORIEV (RUSSIAN 1886-1939)

BORIS GRIGORIEV (RUSSIAN 1886-1939)

Portrait of a Man,
gouache and graphite on board
54 x 36 cm (21 1/4 x 14 1/4 in.) [sight]
signed lower right

PROVENANCE
Sotheby's, 23 April 2004, lot 82
Acquired at the above by the present owner.

LITERATURE
Tamara Galeyeva, Boris Grigoriev (Saint Petersburg: Zolotoy Vek; Khudozhnik Rossii, 2007), no. 208 (illustrated)

LOT NOTES
Boris Grigoriev was an extraordinary and a perspicacious portraitist. His depictions of well-known outstanding figures in Russian culture (those of Gorky, Chaliapin, Rachmaninov, Burliuk) made the artist known internationally. Grigoriev's contemporaries acknowledged his strong portraitship and said that "...he does not actually recreate a specific person in an Artwork, but rather gives his own representation of that one's personality. His portraits fascinate the beholder by an astounding combination of anatomical similarity to a person depicted, with a grotesquery of an image, created in a unique style of the artist." While painting the portraits in an avant-garde manner, Grigoriev never went to extremes, paying tribute to the original purposes of the portrait - a recognizable depiction of a person. The mood of Grigoriev's portraits is never satiric nor scornful. He aimed to show the role that the model is playing in their everyday life (for instance, refer to his portrait of V. Meyerhold)

CONDITION

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