Grigoriev went on to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg under Alexander Kiselyov, Dmitry Kardovsky and Abram Arkhipov from 1907 to 1912.
Grigoriev went on to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg under Alexander Kiselyov, Dmitry Kardovsky and Abram Arkhipov from 1907 to 1912.
Boris Grigoriev was a Russian painter and graphic artist. He was a “master of penetrating clairvoyance”, representative of Russian Art Nouveau.
Background
Boris Grigoryev was born on July 23, 1886 in Moscow. His mother was Klara von Lindenberg from Sweden. Boris was an illegitimate child of Dmitry Grigoryev, a petty bourgeois of the Tsarskoye Selo, who was the managing director of the Rybinsk Department of the Volga Kama Commercial Bank. At the age of four he was officially adopted and began to be brought up in the family of his father; later in he would write in his memories that his childhood in Rybinsk was not happy because of his half-Russian and half-Swedish origin and his base blood.
Education
He studied at the Stroganov Art School from 1903 to 1907 with Dmitry Shcherbinovsky. Grigoriev went on to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg under Alexander Kiselyov, Dmitry Kardovsky and Abram Arkhipov from 1907 to 1912.
The beginning artist traveled across Scandinavia and Austria in 1909 and 1911, and lived in Paris in 1911 and 1913.
He started participating in exhibitions from 1909. He also displayed his works at exhibitions of the art groups Impressionists, Triangle, Association of the Independent, though avoiding extreme forms of avant-garde.
In 1918 Boris Grigoriev created the cycle Russia (Rasea), having proved to be “an extraordinary caustic and angry psychologist of modern degeneration” (as S. K. Makovsky said).
In 1919 the artist emigrated from Russia: together with his wife and four-year-old son he boated over the Gulf of Finland. From 1921 they lived in Paris. In 1927 he settled down in Cagnes-sur-Mer near Nice, in a country house named Borisella after him and the wife.
Boris Grigoriev taught in the Academy of Arts in Santiago (Chile) in 1928 – 1929, in the Russian Academy founded by T. Sukhotina-Tolstaya in Paris in 1929 - 1930, and at his own art school in Cagnes-sur-Mer from 1930.
In 1929 – 1930 the artists created the monumental canvass Faces of the World dedicated the League of Nations. The painting was purchased by the government of Czechoslovakia. In 1934 Boris Grigoriev opened one more art school: it was in New York and was there where he created a cycle of portraits of Russian culture luminaries, called Faces of Russia.
In 1934 he published his poem Russia in the American Russian-language newspaper Novoye Russkoye Slovo. The poem was a poetic reflection of his famous Russia series of paintings. He also wrote a poem, America, which was not published until 2003.