Draft:Roman Grigoryev

Roman Gennadyevich Grigoryev (Russian: Роман Геннадьевич Григорьев; born 24 July 1961) is a Russian art historian and museum curator specializing in Western European printmaking, particularly the graphic work of Rembrandt and the history of print collecting in Russia. His research has focused on the interpretation, cataloguing, and reception of Rembrandt’s prints in Russian museum and private collections.

Education

Grigoryev graduated from the University of Tartu in 1983, where he studied philology and semiotics under Yuri Lotman. He later undertook postgraduate training at the State Hermitage Museum. In 1996, he defended his Candidate of Sciences dissertation at Saint Petersburg State University on Russian battle prints from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.

Career

In 1985, Grigoryev joined the State Hermitage Museum, where he worked with the museum’s collections of Western European prints, including Dutch and Flemish graphic art. His curatorial and scholarly work has concentrated on Rembrandt’s prints and their collecting history in Russia. He is listed by CODART, the international council for curators of Dutch and Flemish art, as a specialist in Dutch and Flemish printmaking.

Alongside his museum work, Grigoryev taught art history and delivered public lectures at the European University at Saint Petersburg, where he addressed topics related to Rembrandt, print culture, and the historiography of collecting.

Works and reception

Grigoryev is the author of monographs and exhibition catalogues devoted to Rembrandt’s prints in Russian collections, most notably the Dmitry Rovinsky collection held at the State Hermitage Museum.

His work has been discussed in independent professional reviews. In Kommersant Weekend, Grigoryev’s research on Rembrandt as a printmaker was examined in the context of Russian collecting history and museum scholarship.

In The Art Newspaper Russia (no. 03 (22), 2014), the historian of collecting Dmitry Ozerkov described Grigoryev’s catalogue of Rembrandt’s prints as offering “a fresh prism for understanding the aesthetic judgments of a nineteenth-century Russian collector,” emphasizing its interpretative contribution to the study of Russian collecting culture.

Grigoryev’s scholarship has also been situated within international print studies. The March 2013 issue of Print Quarterly included a section titled “Rembrandt in Russia” (by Nicholas Stogdon). Writing there, Stogdon notes that Grigoryev “devotes much patient effort to analyzing the evolution and underestimated role of drypoint, and, in rather a sustained tour de force, to classifying the aesthetic implications of Rembrandt's command of his resources, actual and potential, of which only Hercules Seghers amongst his predecessors had but intimations”.

Several of Grigoryev’s books on Rembrandt and printmaking are widely held in international library collections, reflecting their circulation beyond Russian museum contexts. According to WorldCat, his publications are represented in hundreds of libraries worldwide, including multiple editions of his monographs on Rembrandt.

Selected works

• Rembrandt Seen Through Jewish Eyes: The Artist's Meaning to Jews from His Time to Ours.

• Rembrandt: Master of the Copper Plate: Prints from the Rovinsky Collection at the State Hermitage.

• Gravyury Rembrandta iz kollektsii D. A. Rovinskogo v sobranii Ermitazha.

• “The Lotman Paradox.” In Yuri Lotman: On Art. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1998 (with Sergei Daniel).

References

Category:1961 births Category:Living people Category:Russian art historians