Portrait of An Actor Said To Be Nikolai Alexandrov 1923

This portrait of an actor, painted by Boris Grigoriev, has a kind of theatricality to it, wouldn’t you say? The ochre face is like a mask, starkly illuminated against the deep shadows of the background. I imagine Grigoriev working fast, laying down those broad strokes of terracotta and black, trying to capture something of the actor’s presence. The paint isn’t exactly thick, but there’s a materiality there, an immediacy to the application. Look at the area around the collar, the way the white peeks through—it’s almost like a stage curtain being pulled back. I keep wondering, what was Grigoriev trying to say about performance, about the gap between the person and the role? It reminds me a little of some of Kokoschka’s portraits, the way they seem to probe beneath the surface. Painters are always looking at each other, borrowing and riffing, trying to figure out how to express something about what it means to be human. And maybe that’s what this painting is really about—the human capacity for transformation, for stepping into another skin.