BORIS SMIRNOFF (RUSSIAN 1894-1976)

BORIS SMIRNOFF (RUSSIAN 1894-1976)
⊕ †

GRACE KELLY
signed Boris Smirnoff lower right
pencil and pastel on paper
34 x 46cm (64 x 74cm framed)

Renowned for his depictions of Hollywood stars, politicians and industrialists and for his seductive scenes of the French Riviera, Smirnoff became a popular figure in French artistic circles during the first half of the 20th century. Associating with the rich and famous, the following works on paper include portraits of famous Hollywood figures who visited the South of France, including Errol Flynn, Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly and Ava Garner.

Born in Kharkov in Tsarist Russia (now Kharkiv, Ukraine) into a middle class family of French aristocratic émigrés, Smirnoff studied art in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) and worked at the famous avant-garde Meyerhold Theatre in Moscow. Fleeing the Russian revolution, he travelled to Japan and the East before arriving in Paris in the early 1920s where he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. There he studied under the artist Lucien Simon (French 1861-1945) and met and admired the work of Tsuguharu Foujita (Japanese 1886-1968), Foujita's influence evident in the clean linear style, flat compositions and soft pastel palette of Smirnoff's paintings and works on paper.

offered for sale without reserve