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Description

Boris Grigoriev (Russian, 1886-1939)
Portrait of an Actress, circa 1924
Oil on canvas
23-1/2 x 18 inches (59.7 x 45.7 cm)
Apparently unsigned

PROVENANCE:
Boris Grigoriev;
James N. Rosenberg, New York, likely acquired from the above;
Jean Schermerhorn Roosevelt, acquired from the above, 1940s;
Thence by descent.

EXHIBITED:
Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev (New Gallery, November 18–December 15, 1923, Cat. No. 4);
Paintings and Drawings by Boris Grigoriev, Worcester Museum of Art, January 4–February 3, 1924, Cat. No. 17.

ILLUSTRATED:
A pencil sketch of the portrait is illustrated in Réau, Louis, Clare Sheridan, André Levinson, Claude Farrère, and André Antoine, Faces of Russia. Illustrated by Boris Grigoriev. London, 1924.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Réau, Louis, Clare Sheridan, André Levinson, Claude Farrère, and André Antoine. Faces of Russia. Illustrated by Boris Grigoriev. London, 1924.


Portrait of Lydia Koreneva. 1923

One of the outstanding actresses of the Moscow Art Theatre in the twentieth century, Lydia Mikhailovna Koreneva (1885–1982) was repeatedly portrayed by artists across several decades. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky alone produced more than a hundred graphic portraits of her in the late 1900s.

The gifted personality of Koreneva was undoubtedly familiar to Boris Grigoriev from his youth, through the pre-revolutionary productions of the Moscow Art Theatre. He was particularly struck by her performances in The Brothers Karamazov, based on Dostoevsky's novel—a production which, as Koreneva herself acknowledged, brought her moments of the greatest artistic exaltation. In this work, so vital also to Grigoriev's own imagination, she appeared more than once, playing not only Lise (Lise Khokhlakova) but also Katerina Ivanovna. Dostoevsky's heroines suited her temperament perfectly: nervous, mercurial, and refined in appearance. As Lise, she conveyed both the fragile charm of youth and the feverish, tormented sensitivity of a troubled soul.

Grigoriev painted Koreneva's portrait in 1923, inspired by the Moscow Art Theatre's Paris tour, as part of his celebrated series Faces of Russia (Visages de Russie, 1922–1924). Beginning on December 5, 1922, the artist spent two weeks observing the troupe's performances at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées—productions of Tolstoy's Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, Gorky's The Lower Depths, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The casts included many of the Moscow Art Theatre's finest actors—V. I. Kachalov, I. M. Moskvin, O. L. Knipper-Chekhova, P. A. Baksheev, A. L. Vishnevsky, N. A. Podgorny, V. V. Luzhsky—and, among them, L. M. Koreneva. All fell under Grigoriev's attentive gaze. He sketched feverishly backstage and in dressing rooms, inviting actors to his Paris studio. These swift, spontaneous portrait drawings—alive with the vivid impressions and dramatic emotions of the theatre—formed the basis of the Visage de Rissie cycle, published in Paris in 1923 and in London a year later as an album. The suite ranks among Grigoriev's finest achievements, expressing a vision of Russia more complex and elegiac than that of his earlier series Raseya (1917–1922).

The painted portrait of Lydia Koreneva grew from a pencil drawing of a curly-haired "impish girl," as the artist himself described her. Shown in profile with sharply defined features, Koreneva is absorbed in the tense, nervous state of Lise. In the oil version, the airy, weightless quality of the drawing gives way to a denser modeling: the pallor and fragility of the thin face are rendered with delicacy and nuance, while the mass of reddish curls bound by a brown velvet ribbon introduces a note of capricious freedom—befitting the image of a spoiled, high-spirited young woman. The background, divided into two contrasting fields of deep red and olive tones, together with the black dress and transparent high collar, invests the figure with a mature dramatic gravity.

Grigoriev returned to the motif of Koreneva's portrait in the early 1930s, when he once again engaged with The Brothers Karamazov in an independent illustrative cycle (1932, sixty sheets), continuing his exploration of Dostoevskian psychology and the theatrical soul of Russia in exile.

Heritage Auctions is grateful to Dr. Tamara Alexandrovna Galeeva for her research and note on this lot.

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Estimate: $50,000 - $70,000.

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