(1894-1976). Born in Tsarist Russia, Smirnoff was a Franco-Russian cubist. His family escaped to France in 1917 but Boris stayed to study art in Petrograd and worked at the Meyerhold Theatre. In 1926 he fell under the spell of Pavel Filonov and the new ‘Analytical Art’ movement. He moved to France in 1927 and studied with Lucien Simon and the l’École de Beaux-arts, Paris. As a result, much of his pre-war work destroyed by the Nazis as degenerate art; he subsequently worked on paper as the works were ‘easy to carry off in a crisis’. After the war, he lived and worked all over Europe and the Far East, finally settling in Russia where died aged one hundred and four. He exhibited extensively worldwide, but in line with his old master Filonov, he refused to sell his work up to his dying day.