Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev

Mrs. Josephine B. Crane, Dalton, Massachusetts
Acquired as a gift from the above in 1948

Boris Grigoriev, Rasseia, Berlin, 1922, illustrated
Ivan Narodny, "Art Under the Soviet Rule," International Studio, New York, March 1923, p. 466, illustrated

This painting is in beautiful condition. The paint layer is slightly dirty, yet not noticeably so. Some fairly large cracks have developed in the upper center. These do not seem to give rise to any paint loss and in general the paint layer is stable. This picture could be improved, yet for the purposes of auction it could also be sold in its current condition. The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Shepherd of the Hills, dated 1920 when the artist lived in Berlin, is arguably the most significant image in Boris Grigoriev's Rasseia cycle, an early series of portraits of the Russian peasantry. In it he depicts Russian poet Nikolai Klyuev, well-known leader of the "peasant poets" of the early twentieth century.

The painter's bold technique and unique style are immediately recognizable. Klyuev is monumentally centered in the composition, and the vibrant pigment in his peasant shirt and emblematic hat seem to contradict his wearied expression; his presence is further monumentalized against the stark background, scattered with rooftops and sweeping blue hills, creating a sense of spherical perspective around the figure's face. Meanwhile,the artist's palette comes to life with vivid, brazen spots of color, painted with thick brushstrokes that create a Cubist-inspired patchwork of geometric shapes, particularly evident in Klyuev's fragmented face. As in many of his Rasseia portraits, especially those featuring peasants with farm animals, Grigoriev implements this technique to emphasize the relationship between subject and environment; here, Klyuev's face is paralleled with those of sheep.

Grigoriev's brushstrokes are like a form of visual poetry unto themselves, so it is fitting that Nikolai Klyuev, father of the Russian "people's poetry," would be the focus of his tribute to the Russian peasant.  The two met in Petrograd, and in the summer of 1918 Grigoriev traveled to Klyuev's homeland in Olonets province to work on his Rasseia cycle. After emigrating, Grigoriev recounted the episode in his own words, "I was blessed by Klyuev, in the Far North—at an apiary—and at the pure log huts of his birthplace. I am reminded of the words of Klyuev, the people's poet, who survived through the Soviet regime: Revolution for the mind, but for the heart—Kitezh," referring to the mythical city of ancient Rus (B. Grigorev, "O Novom," Part IV // Voice of Russia, Berlin, 1920, no. 139). He painted his first portrait of Klyuev in 1918, and in 1919 it was exhibited at the First State Free Art Exhibition in Petrograd in the Winter Palace. He did not keep the picture, and its composition is known only from its reproduction as the frontispiece of volume one of the collection Pesnoslov, where it appears above Klyuev's signature. Interestingly, the second volume features the following allusive stanza from Klyuev's "I descend from the princes of Lapland...":

Icy Vrubel and ardent Grigoriev
Solved the reindeer-moss dream-book's secret;
And their yearning—like northern seas' sperm whales—
Yields the cargo dispatched in my ships.

(from N. Klyuev, Pesnoslov, Petrograd, 1919, as translated by Dr. J. Alexander Ogden)

Grigoriev painted multiple and technically more complex variations of this image for both his Rasseia and Faces of Russia cycles. Shepherd of the Hills stands out above the rest, in part because it is one of only a few works that the artist chose to reproduce in color in his pivotal publication Rasseia, printed in Berlin in 1922. The painting received what is arguably the most prominent positioning in the book, on the right-hand side of the spread immediately following the title page. The image is strikingly similar to that of Klyuev with sheep in the large-scale Faces of Russia composition, a compilation of distressed and haunting faces, composing a countryside that is at once desolate yet blazing with psychological intensity. Faces of Russia was sold recently at Sotheby's as part of the Rostropovich collection, and it stands to reason that Grigoriev derived that image of Klyuev directly from the present lot. Otherwise, the most similar variation is his portrait of Klyuev painted for the later Faces of Russia cycle and now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Museum acquired that picture in 1942 as part of the collection of Christian Brinton, the American curator who is largely responsible for Grigoriev's success in America.

As leader of the peasant poets of the early twentieth century, Klyuev wrote poems seeped in Russian folklore and his verse ran parallel to Grigoriev's visual oeuvre. He underscored the hardships and synchronous joys of peasant life, encouraging a return to the Slavophile movement of the nineteenth century and opposition to the pressed approach of industrialization.

Klyuev was born into a peasant family in 1884 and he was raised in the small town of Vytegra, near the southeastern shore of Lake Onega. Klyuev's home was remote and untouched by industrialization; its residents practiced a form of Christianity with paganistic elements and spent their lives working on the land. He began his literary career in Vytegra and, despite sporadic attempts to join the modernist literary circles in St. Petersburg and Moscow, he never left for long. He felt a deep connection to the peasant lifestyle, and the Russian countryside and peasantry remained central to his repertoire of poems. Just as Grigoriev's depictions of Russian peasants are at once harsh and soft, bleak and hopeful, Klyuev's poems maintain the same sense of contradiction. Meanwhile, his lyrical verse is rich with religious and prophetic references, and he creates a soft, rhapsodic texture as he depicts the harsh toils and isolation of peasant life:

The angel of simple human affairs
Is blue at dusk, white at dawn.
He lit a candle before a round loaf,
Wove a cornflower into the beard of twilight
And strummed cricket-like from the hearth:
"Peace to you, sown field and hunchback barn,
Peace to the hearth where nets are always rich
With sunfish of the years!"

...

Russia's lips swell from brown blood;
The stone has been cast back,
Night has fallen on the universe
And a sobbing Peter stands at the gates...

(from"Mother Sabbath")

Although serving as a joyous homage to the natural life of the peasant, his words are rich with melancholic undertones. Klyuev himself referred to his longer poems as perstryad—detailed and complex quilts of imagery. These poems are precisely like the patchwork of Grigoriev's Faces of Russia, in which each profile provides a close and unabashed look into the vulnerable eyes and soul of the peasant, struggling and determined to persevere. Shepherd of the Hills puts a public face on the universal portraits of Grigoriev's Rasseia cycle, and so Klyuev's ultimate demise is all the more heartbreaking for what it represents. He was executed in 1937 for his alleged opposition to the Soviet regime.