Vladimir Davidovich Baranov-Rossiné, 1888-1944

Baranov-Rossiné returned to Russia from France shortly after the February 1917 Revolution. The following years marked a period of great activity. Anatoly Lunacharsky, whom he had first met in Paris, had been appointed Minister for Enlightenment, and Baranov-Rossiné was prompted to Join the Board of Art and Handicrafts with Nathan Altman and Nikolai Punin.

He participated in a number of distinguished exhibitions at this time, notably World of Art and Exhibition of Pictures and Sculpture by Jewish Artists in Moscow from July to August 1918, along with such formidable names as Marc Chagall and David Shteremberg. It is believed the offered lot was also exhibited here.

From 1918, this work demonstrates the artist’s talent as an innovator with an eclectic style. As with many concepts of the International Avant-garde, Cubism had a very different interpretation in Russia than it did in France. It was a method of constructing the painting, rather than a strict impression of the subject. Malevich wrote that ‘the canvas of a creator painter is a place where he builds a world of his own intuition’.(K.Malevich, O novyikh sistemakh v iskusstve, Vitebsk, 1920). In the controlled chaos of textures, there are clear elements of Orphism, the term used by Guillaume Appollinaire to describe the art movement emerging from Cubism but tending towards abstraction. But the addition of intense colour and three-dimensionality to Baranoff-Rossiné’s composition brings an additional sense of movement and vibration to this portrait. Baranoff-Rossiné’s interest in the musical qualities of colour drew him to experiment with its properties at the High Art Technical workshops, where he taught a detailed study of colour and form in two and three dimensions.

Pablo Picasso’s Harlequin from 1918 serves as an interesting comparison with the present lot. In his quest for a workable compromise between Cubist reality and visual reality, Picasso had begun to combine the two, reflecting the conviction that a painter cannot fully express what he sees and knows about reality if he expresses it only in one way (see Fig.1). Similarly, in Salome, Baranov-Rossiné juxtaposes two levels of reality, visual and aural.