RUSSIAN - Bloomsbury Auctions

154 Russian Literature & Art
Lot 245. SOMOV, Konstantin Andreevich (1869-1939).
Portrait of Mrs. Girshman. 1928. Pastel (370 x 255 mm). Signed, inscribed
“Paris” and dated Nov. 1928 lower right. Framed. Exhibited: 14 June - 17
September 1967, The Gallery of Modern Art, New York. Illustrated: A Survey
of Russian Painting : Fifteenth Century to the Present; p. 64.
an exquisite portrait of the famous russian patroness.
Somov was one of the greatest Russian portraitists. His father was a curator
at the Hermitage and he studied under Ilya Repin at the Imperial Academy
of Arts from 1888 to 1897. While there, he became friends with Sergei
Diaghilev, Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois and was a founding member
of the influential Mir Iskusstva [World of Art] group in St. Petersburg. His
elegant portraits of Aleksandr Blok, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Vyacheslav
Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin and others helped define the luxurious Silver Age.
After the Revolution, Somov left for the United States but did not care for
America and went to Paris to live and work in 1925. It was there that his old
friend from St. Petersburg, Mrs. Girshman, posed for her portrait. Genrietta
Leopoldovna Girshman (1895-1970) was a grand patroness of Russian
composers, musicians, authors and artists. She and her businessman husband
Vladimir held an esteemed salon in St. Petersburg. She was also friends with
Benois, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Nabokov and nearly every other important
Russian artistic figure of the first half of the twentieth century, both in prerevolutionary
Russia and in exile. Valentin Serov’s portraits of both Girshmans
are among that artist’s best known paintings. Somov had previously painted
Mrs. Girshman’s portrait in 1915; she and her husband were avid collectors of
his works, owning eighty works. This pastel is arguably one of Somov’s most
penetrating and sympathetic portraits.
$100000 – $150000