Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné

Baranoff-Rossiné Family (thence by descent)

Paris, Galerie Art Vivant, Rétrospective Rossiné, 1954, no. 1
Paris, Galerie Jean Chauvelin, Vladimir Baranoff Rossiné, February 6  - March 6, 1970, no. 2 (as executed in 1907)
London, Rutland Gallery, Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, November, 1970
Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne,Vladimir Baranoff Rossiné, December 12, 1972 - January 29, 1973, no. 9
Paris, Galerie Verneuil - Saints - Perès, Baranoff Rossiné 1888 - 1944, 1984, no. 8 (as executed in 1909 - 1910)
Paris, Russes, Musée de Montmartre,  2003, p. 134, illustrated

Pierre Breuillard-Limondin at M.J. Mausset, Mémoire sur Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, Paris, Université de Paris VIII, p. 28, illustrated as executed circa 1906-1908, no. 88
Touring Club de France, Paris, 1973, no. 844, illustrated
Galerie, Paris, 1973. no. 123, illustrated
Andrei Sarabianov, Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, Moscow, 2002, p. 100, illustrated
Pascal Bonafoux, L'Autoportrait di XXéme siècle, Paris, 2004, illustrated

 

Baranoff-Rossiné's Self-Portrait is one of the most important works by the artist to come up at auction. The boldness of the artist's approach to himself as subject suggests he is an artist to be reckoned with; an unabashed, serious presence within the international art world.   Baranoff-Rossiné painted many self-portraits and in each one he meets the viewer's gaze directly (fig. 2). Unlike artists such as Gauguin, for example, whose Self-Portrait in a Hat shows the artist juxtaposed against his own work, Baranoff-Rossiné's portrait emerges from a background of pure color, fragmented by the sheer force of his presence.

There appears to be a discrepancy about the exact execution date of the present work.  In the 1984 Galerie Verneuil-Saints-Pères, exhibition catalogue, there is a similar self-portrait in gouache, which bears the date 1909 on the reverse; stylistically, it serves as a good comprable to the present painting; however, historically this self-portrait has been dated everywhere from circa 1907, in the 1970 Galerie Jean Chauvelin exhibition catalogue to circa 1915 in the Andrei Sarabianov exhibition catague in 2002. Despite the mild confusion in dates, it is known that Baranoff-Rossiné arrived in France in 1910, and immediately ensconsed himself into Parisian art circles.

Baranoff-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.

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, Baranoff-Rossiné presents his own derivative of the Cubist idiom in his magnificent Self-Portrait, which pulsates with energy and life, behind the gaze of a serious and profound artist.  Baranoff-Rossiné demarcates space through geometric layers of bold colors.  His signature vibrating, and slicing arcs which accent the composition engender volume and atmosphere, an unconventional approach akin to the experimental work of friend Robert Delaunay (fig 2).  The combination of color and geometry suffuses the present work with rhythm and musicality and achieves ``color in motion,’’ a concept the artist adhered to throughout his oeuvre.  Baranoff-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).