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Boris Grigoriev
Boris Grigoryev was born 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.
After finishing the Imperial Stroganov School in Moscow in 1907, he became an auditor of the Higher Art School under the St. Petersburg Arts Academy. 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. In 1913 he became a member of the World of Art association. 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). Boris Grigoryev was no less categorical expressing his attitude: “One cannot love a person who thinks with his/her biceps, and sees through his/her cataract”.
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.
Boris Grigoryev died of cancer, just like his best friend Alexander Yakovlev.
