Lot Essay
Una joven californiana (A Young Californian) dates from the mid-1920s when Boris Grigoriev was residing mostly in the United States. In 1923 he had been invited by the art critic Christian Brinton to exhibit his paintings at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. A few years after his arrival in America he had grown weary of the many society portrait commissions that kept him traveling around the country and stymied his creativity. The generalized title and expressive brushstrokes of the present work reflect the tendency of Grigoriev to experiment within portraiture, creating works that represent 'not so much as the concrete individual as much as his own notion of the person, with the portrait quite often turning out to be closer to a narrative painting' (ed. V. Terechina , Linija: literaturnoe i chudozhestvennoe nasledie, Moscow, 2006, p. 8).
In 1928, Grigoriev was invited to teach at the Academy of Arts in Santiago, Chile where the artistic community had already perceived him as recognized expert in the arts. That same year, a retrospective of his paintings was mounted the Museo de Bellas Artes, in which the present work was exhibited alongside other important portraits by Grigoriev, including his famous portrait of the writer Maxim Gorky. Many of the paintings in the exhibition had already been shown in Europe and were brought to Chile by Grigoriev as he was known for traveling with his paintings in tow.
In 1928, Grigoriev was invited to teach at the Academy of Arts in Santiago, Chile where the artistic community had already perceived him as recognized expert in the arts. That same year, a retrospective of his paintings was mounted the Museo de Bellas Artes, in which the present work was exhibited alongside other important portraits by Grigoriev, including his famous portrait of the writer Maxim Gorky. Many of the paintings in the exhibition had already been shown in Europe and were brought to Chile by Grigoriev as he was known for traveling with his paintings in tow.