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Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné
abstract art par excellence
1888-1944
Biography
UKRAINE | RUSSIA
1888
Birth Name: “Wladimir Davidovich Baranov Rossiné”
Birth Place: Kherson, Ukraine (part of the Russian monarchy at the
time, before World War I).
1903-1907
Studies: in Odessa.
Later, at Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.
Later, at L’Ecole Supérieure Technique.
Biography
UKRAINE | RUSSIA
Biography
UKRAINE | RUSSIA
1907-1910
Early Exhibitions:
The first historic exhibitions of Russian avant-garde movement in
Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev, regrouping artists, musicians and
sculptors as a synthesis of all the arts.
“A young Russian artist called Rossiné, interested in the theory of
painting and particularly in the music of colour, wishes to meet you”,
wrote Kandinsky in a letter to Thomas von Hartmann.
// Wassily Kandinsky is a prominent Russian painter and art theorist //
Biography
UKRAINE | RUSSIA
Sample work of the period
(Impressionism)
Still life with candle.
(Russian Museum)
1910 oil on canvas.
Biography
FRANCE
1910-1914
First visit to Paris, France.
Colorful paintings showing an assimilation of Cubism, Futurism and
Orphism (lyrical abstraction using bright colors. Term coined after Orpheus, poet and
symbol of song in Greek mythology).
Biography
FRANCE
Sample work of the period
(Cubo-futurism)*
Adam and Eve (Collection of
Carmen Thyseen-Bornemisza)
1912 oil on canvas.
* (Unlike Cubism, Cubo-futurism
emphasizes motion and vibrant colors ).
Biography
FRANCE
1910-1914
Experimentation with sculpture, constituted of fragments of painted
metal, wood and found objects.
One of these sculptures, exhibited at the 1914 Salon des
Indépendants, provoked such ridicule that he later threw it into the
Seine river. Only the French critic, Guillaume Apollinaire, understood
its radical and expressive idiom, comparable to early “sculptopaintings” of the same years.
Now working in Paris under the name Daniel Rossiné
Biography
FRANCE
Rossiné collaborated with Alexander
Archipenko in creating painting-sculptures.
Sample work of the period
(Painting Sculpture)
Polychrome sculpture Symphony Number
One. (Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York)
1913 wood, cardboard and eggshells
Biography
FRANCE
1910-1914
Artistic development
Studio set up at La Ruché, in the circle of Robert and Sonia Delaunay
(Mentors)
Together with the Delaunays, he developed ‘French Orphic Cubism'
Biography
FRANCE
Sonia Delaunay (Mentor)
(French Orphism)
Untitled
(Galerie Saint Laurent)
1917 watercolor and crayon
on paper.
Biography
FRANCE
Sample work of the period
(French Orphism)
Fjord Christinija. (St. Petersburg)
1915 oil on canvas
Biography
FRANCE
“I am attracted by pure colours. Colours from my childhood,
from the Ukraine. Memories of peasant weddings in my
country in which the red and green dresses decorated with
many ribbons, billowed in dance.”
Biography
HOLLAND
1914
Rossiné's Influence:
Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg described Baranoff-Rossiné's
Symphony Number Two, exhibited in Amsterdam in 1914, as an
example of the art of the future.
Van Doesburg painted the Mouvement Héroique arguably inspired by
the Symphony 2, this being in applying complementary colours redgreen and yellow-purple to suggest opposing forces.
Biography
SCANDINAVIA
Theo van Doesburg
Mouvement Héroique
(Private Collection)
1916 pastel on paper
Biography
SCANDINAVIA
1915-1917
At the outbreak of WWI, he fled to Norway.
First one-man exhibition in Oslo, Norway in 1916.
In Stockholm, Sweden, he played the Optophonic Piano that he
invented for the first time.
Biography
SCANDINAVIA
“Imagine that each key of a
piano or an organ keyboard
stops at a chosen position, or
makes a specific element of
a set of transparent filters
move, more or less quickly,
transpierced by a beam of
white light, and you will have
some idea of the instrument
invented by BaranoffRossiné.”– autobiographic text
Biography
RUSSIA
1917-1922
Return to Russia
Russia’s military defeat in WWI. Food shortages triggering the
Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union.
Married his first wife in 1919. She died in childbirth in 1920 in Moscow
to his first son, Eugène (1920-1997).
Biography
RUSSIA
1917-1922
Takes the double-barrelled name of Baranoff-Rossiné
He participated in mobilizing the Soviet avant-garde movement.
In 1918 Baranoff-Rossiné set up an Art Workshop in a room in the
former St. Petersburg Academy. In the same year he had an exhibition
with the group Jewish Society for the Furthering of the Arts in Moscow.
Rossiné was now presenting optophonic concerts in Moscow theatres
Biography
RUSSIA
Sample work of the period
(Cubism)
Women. (Private Collection)
1919 oil on canvas
Biography
RUSSIA
1923-1924
Married Pauline Cemionovna Boukour, with whom he gave two piano
optophonic concerts, at the Meyerhold theatre and Bolchoï (Moscow).
Biography
FRANCE
1925-1939
Brought his son Eugène and his wife Pauline with him back to Paris.
Founded the first Optophonic Academy in 1927 and pursued his
audiovisual research work.
Birth in Paris of his second son, Michel in 1928, who died accidentally
in 1935, and of his daughter Tatiana in 1934.
His Polythechnique Sculpture provoked the sarcasm of the press, but
this sculpture is currently exhibited at the National Modern Art Museum
in Paris.
Biography
FRANCE
Biography
FRANCE
1925-1939
Adopting a more Surrealist manner.
Experimentation with materials, colors and sounds, exhibiting regularly
in the Parisian Salons.
WWII breaks out.
Biography
FRANCE
Sample work of the period
(Surrealism)
Le Jugement de Pâris
(Private Collection)
1928 oil on canvas.
Biography
FRANCE
Sample work of the period
(Surrealism)
Le martyr de Saint Denis
(Private Collection)
1932 oil on canvas.
Biography
FRANCE
1940-1941
Baranoff-Rossiné invented military camouflage, which was marketed
with Robert Delaunay.
Baranoff-Rossine also invented a Photochromometer that allowed the
determination of the qualities of precious stones.
In another field, he perfected a machine that made, sterlized and
distributed fizzy drinks, the Multiperco, and this received several
technical awards at the time.
Biography
FRANCE
1942
Birth of his third son Dimitri in Paris.
Dimitri was the one to re-build the Optophonic Piano, after it had been
disassembled during WWII. The piano is currently kept at the National
Modern Art Museum in Paris.
Dimitri and Tatiana Baranoff-Rossiné still reside in Paris, and can be
contacted on: [email protected]
Biography
POLAND
1943-1944
In 1943, Vladimir Baranoff-Rossine was arrested in France by the
Gestapo and deported.
He died in the Auschwitz concentration camp, in Poland.
Biography
POLAND
Audio-Visuals
BARANOFF-ROSSINE
More on the Optophonic Piano
One of Rossiné’s philosophies is running counter to the possibility of
any match between sight and hearing: using processes involving
notions of chance, random noise and silence. His intention was to
challenge the "correspondences" ideal.
“The piano functions by various kinds of luminous filters; plain
coloured ones, prisms, lenses and mirrors; filters including graphic
elements and, finally, filters with colored shapes and defined outlines.
Add to this the possibility of modifying the position of the projector, the
screen frame, the symmetry or asymmetry of the compositions and
their movements, as well as their intensity.”
Audio-Visuals
BARANOFF-ROSSINE
More on the Optophonic Piano
“… The aim is not to determine a unique rendering of an existing
musical composition… One has to take into account elements such as
the talent and sensitivity of the musician in order to fully understand
the composer’s thoughts.”
“The day when a composer composes music using notes that remain
to be determined in terms of music and light, the interpreter will have
less freedom, and on that day, the artistic unity we are discussing will
probably be closer to perfection.”– autobiographic text.
Audio-Visuals
BARANOFF-ROSSINE
More on the Optophonic Piano
“A = black, E = white, DO = violet, RÉ indigo... poet’s fantasy.
Oboe = green, flute = blue, trumpet = red, these are purely literary
reconciliations that, even if they might be exact, are incapable of
moving us.
In a musical composition we distinguish the three following basic
elements; the intensity of the sound, the pitch of the sound, the rhythm
and movement. This will be one of Baranoff-Rossiné’s merits to have
been able to extract these elements from music to bring them closer to
similar elements existing or able to exist in light..”– autobiographic text.
Audio-Visuals
BARANOFF-ROSSINE
For more information, visit
http://www.baranoffrossine.com
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Metro/8705/index.htm