She moved to Paris in 1924 and specialised in psychiatry. There, she associated with the Russian bohemians and became a close friend of the poet Boris Poplavski, who was the lover of her sister Dina Grigorievna. She began to paint in the 1930 and exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries in 1936. She took a keen interest in the intel- lectual and philosophical debates of the Russian emigrant community (the philoso- phers Berdyaev and Shestov, the "Green lamp" literary soiréesof the Zinaida Gippius- Merezhkovsky couple) and associated with Chaim Soutine, who encouraged her to pursue her pictorial endeavours; their friendship would last until the Jewish Belarusian painter's death. At the beginning of World War Il, she began to paint scarves. Jean Paulhan helped her and her family find shelter in the South ofFrance in 1942. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie Favier in Montpellier in 1943. After 1945, she mixed with the Parisian literary circles. In 1946, the Parisian gallery Pétrides exhibited her work and produced a catalogue, Portraits de viande (Portraits of meat"), prefaced by Francis Carco. She then exhibited her 20 jeuxnécessaires - 40 gestes inutiles ("20necessary games - 40 useless gestures"), with a catalogue written by Paulhan, Henri Calet, Marc Bernard, Francis Ponge, and Maurice Nadeau). Her pain- tings, which were still abstract at the time, were grouped into cycles. She began to add various items to her surfaces (pieces of wire, leaves, fragments of objects) in the 1950s.