Gods and Foolish Grandeur

Friday, May 20, 2016

The bright, rough edge - selected paintings of Boris Grigoriev

Self-portrait, 1916.

Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev (11 July 1886, Rybinsk – 7 February 1939, Cagnes-sur-Mer), Russian painter, graphic artist, and writer. He studied at the Stroganov Art School from 1903 to 1907, then went on to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg until 1912. He had begun exhibiting his work in 1909 as a member of the Union of Impressionists group, and became a member of the World of Art movement in 1913; in that same year, he wrote a novel, Young Rays. The artist lived for a time in Paris, where he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and, after his return to Saint Petersburg in 1913, he became part of the Bohemian scene in St. Petersburg and was close to many of the artists and writers of the time, such as Sergei Sudeikin, Velimir Khlebnikov, and the great poet Anna Akhmatova. Grigoriev was also interested in the Russian peasantry, the countryside and village life, and from 1916 to 1918 he created a series of paintings and graphic works inspired by the strength and poverty of the Russian peasant. Leaving Russia after the Revolution, he thereafter traveled and spent much time in Western Europe, the United States, and Central and South America. He also focused much of his time on his poetry. Grigoriev died in a suburb of Nice at the age of fifty-two.

Portrait of a Woman, circa 1930.

Yakov L'vovich Izrailevich, circa 1916.

The poetess Anna Sergeievna Sergeieva, 1921.

Detail of above.

The photographer Miron Ambramovich Sherling, 1916.

Woman in a Hat, 1919.

Portrait of Madame Barthelemy with a Green Fan, ND (circa late 1920s to early 1930s).

Detail of above.

Solomon Illich Mollo, 1917.

Boy in Sailor Suit (John Goldsmith?), circa 1923-24.

Detail of above.

Vignette From a Fair in Guingamp, Bretagne, 1914.

Sergei Rachmaninov, 1931.

Princess Salomea Nikolaievna Andronikova, 1921. (Actually, her patronymic was Ivanovna but she just didn't like the sound of it....)

Poverty, 1925.

The actor Nikolai Podgorny as Peter Trofimov in Chekov's "The Cherry Orchard", circa 1920s.

Patricio Edwards, 1928.

Woman in Red (the artist wrote in pencil on the stretcher: "à cher madame A. Roméo. Boris Grigoriev Santiago [Chile] 1936", 1936.

Art collector Alexander Alexandrovich Korovin, 1916.

Selma Alexander, circa 1933.

Detail of above.

Portrait of the Artist's Son, Kirill, 1920.

Kirill, the Artist's Son, 1931.

The Artist's Son, 1931. Interesting to compare these last two very contrasting paintings, apparently done in the same year; could
the former be how the artist saw his young son, and the latter a reflection of how the sixteen year old boy wanted to see himself?

Gypsy and Prostitute, 1917.

In the Circus, 1918.

Childhood, 1916.

Probably his best known work, the famous double portrait of director, actor, and theatrical producer Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold, 1916.

Detail of above.

Sunday, May 15, 2016

Nocturne and gold - paintings by John Atkinson Grimshaw

Moonlight on the Lake, Roundhay Park, Leeds. (Almost all of the paintings featured in this post were completed in the 1870s and 1880s.)

John Atkinson Grimshaw (6 September 1836, Leeds – 13 October 1893, Leeds), English Victorian-era artist. He is best known for his autumnal, sparsely populated landscape settings, his crepuscular or moonlit views of city and suburban streets and of the docks in London, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow.

The Lovers.

At the age of twenty, he married his cousin Frances Hubbard (1835–1917). Four years later, to the dismay of his parents, he left his job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway to become a painter. He first exhibited in 1862 - mostly paintings of birds, fruit, and flowers - under the patronage of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. His work would be much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and in the 1880s Grimshaw maintained a London studio in Chelsea, not far from the studio of James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

A Moonlit Lane.

Grimshaw died of tuberculosis a month before his fifty-seventh birthday and is buried in the former Woodhouse Cemetery. He left behind no papers, letters, or journals, so there has been little material on which to base scholarship of his life and career. Several of his children - Arthur E. Grimshaw (1864–1913), Louis H. Grimshaw (1870–1944), Wilfred Grimshaw (1871–1937), and Elaine Grimshaw (1877–1970) - also became painters.