Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné

Family of the artist
Private Collection

Paris, Galerie Jean Chauvelin, Aspects de l'avant-garde russe, 1905-1925, 1969
Paris, Galerie Jean Chauvelin, Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, 1888-1942, 1970, no. 9, illustrated cover, as Nature Morte à la Chaise, 1911
London, Rutland Gallery, Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, 1888-1942, Retrospective Exhibition, 1970, no. 53
Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Baranoff-Rossiné, 1972-1973, no. 16, illustrated as La Chaise, 1911
Moscow, State Tretyakov Gallery, Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, 2002, p. 55, illustrated as Still-Life with Chair
Paris, Musée de Montmartre, Russes, 2003, p. 145, illustrated

Baranov-Rossiné was a versatile artist, thinker and inventor.  His artistic experiments in a variety of media, whether easel painting or pictorial relief and sculpture, set him apart as a unique innovator.  His passion for science and technology led him to investigate the laws of light and invent a number of apparatuses, including a type of magnifying glass essential for gemology.  Other inventions included a color-visual optophone, which greatly contributed to the art of color music.    He articulated his idea of a polychromatic palette in a letter to good friends Sonya and Robert Delaunay whose friendship played a critical role in Baranov-Rossiné’s artistic development.  In his 1916 exhibition in Norway, Baranov-Rossiné explained, ``Have you seen my palette?...Any color, being it white, black or red can, nevertheless, be transformed by its relationship to the neighboring color.  If you know paints, you have to predict their alteration.  As you can see, I have divided my palette into various color sections-green, blue lilac, red, orange, black, brown and white.  By this means, I am able to obtain what I want’’ (as quoted in Jean-Claude Marcade, ``Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné-Inventor,’’ Baranov-Rossiné, State Tretyakov Gallery, 2002, p. 6).

Baranov-Rossiné painted the present work in 1911, one year after he arrived in Paris, and the same year that he traveled to Strousburg. Although Cubism originated with Picasso and Braque as early as 1906, by 1910, the Cubist movement began to gain great momentum and was officially launched at the Paris Salon d’Automne and at the Salon des Indépendents, with Cubist exhibitions taking place in Paris and other metropolitan centers.  Clearly influenced by this pictorial representation, Baranov-Rossiné presents his own derivative of the Cubist idiom in Still Life with Chair, which pulsates with energy and life.  Baranov-Rossiné transforms a static subject into a dynamic tour de force and thus eschews a traditional approach to Cubism visible in André Derain's 1910 Still Life on a Table (see fig. 1). Space is demarcated through geometric layers of bold colors, and the vibrating, slicing arcs that accent the composition engender volume and atmosphere, an unconventional approach akin to the experimental work of friend Robert Delaunay (see fig. 2).  The combination of color and geometry suffuses the present compsition with rhythm and musicality and achieves ``color in motion,’’ a concept the artist adhered to throughout his oeuvre.  Baranov-Rossiné was among the first Russian artists to experiment with cubism; however he was too much of what Marcade termed ``un genie multiple,’’ to espouse one style, and as Gleb Pospelov points out,   ``features of this or that ``ism’’ never became fixed principals within a personal cosmology, but merely new and various means of ``arranging his pictorial solutions’’ (Gleb Pospelov, ``Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné,’’ ibid., p. 10).