Vladimir Davidovich Baranov-Rossiné

H. de Graaf, The Hague
Joseph H.Gosschell
Selected Artists Galleries Inc., New York
Acquired from the above by the previous owner
Sotheby's New York, Russian Art, 21 April 2005

A.Shatskikh, N.Avtonomova, Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, The Artist of the Russian Avant-Garde, Palace Editions, The State Russian Museum 2007, illustrated p.15

The canvas is original and has a horizontal seam along the centre of the work and been extended on the left hand side by 4cm. There are two horizontal seams running across this vertical strip: one at 6cm from the lower edge, the other at 42.5cm from the lower edge) The paint surface is quite matt and may benefit from a light clean. There are some small spots of light staining in places. There are patches of fine craquelure to the paint surface, predomunantly at the centre of the composition. Some pigments appear quite dark under UV (the brown and black tones especially). There appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a simple gold painted frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Executed circa 1912-1913, Nude Dancers is considered among the most significant works from Baranov-Rossiné's Paris period, and a companion painting to his masterpiece at the Centre Georges Pompidou, The Forge (fig.1). The canvas pulsates with musical rhythm and physical force. Its radical composition of fractured planes and undulating lines is a direct reflection of Orphic Cubism, a new movement heralded in 1912 by Guillaume Apollinaire, a close friend of Picasso, as a form of 'pure painting' in which the subject would no longer count at all. The principal artists of the movement, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, were focused primarily on colour, at that point banished from Picasso and Braque's work. More skilfully than many of his contemporaries, Baranov-Rossiné managed to temper the Delaunay's vigourous palette with the restraint of the Cubists, while retaining the instinctive delight in rhythm and curves which would become the hallmark of his later work.

His vivid shades of green, purple and red also recall the early work of another key member of the movement, František Kupka, for example his monumental Planes by Colours, Large Nude. In this work, again, the artist renders the central figure with an innovative modelling technique based not on line or shade, but colour. Like Kupka, Baranov-Rossiné sections these bodies into fantastic tonal planes to emphasise the fluidity and plasticity of the dancers.  Comparisons with Henri Matisse's The Dance (1909-10), then in the collection of Sergei Shchukin in Moscow, and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1913) are as inevitable as they are legitimate, and underscore the magnitude of Baranov-Rossiné's contribution to the advancement of aesthetic modernism.

In 1911, Baranov-Rossiné left the Odessa School of Arts to live in Paris as part of a wave of Russian artists already well acquainted with French avant-garde movements. Figures such as Shchukin and the art-publisher Nikolai Ryabushinsky reinforced the strong, if complex relationship between French and Russian art in the early twentieth century. The early style of this émigré Académie Russe can be described as Neo-Impressionism with elements of Fauvism.

By the following year he had settled at the legendary artist's colony La Ruche alongside Aleksandr Arkhipenko, Mark Chagall and Chaim Soutine and established himself as one of the most radically innovative artists in Paris. In the early 1910s, Kandinsky described his new acquaintance, Rossiné, as 'a marvel', and he was a regular participant in the famous soirées held by Baroness d'Ettingen and Serge Férat. In view of the artistic ferment in the French capital, it is unsurprising perhaps that Baranov-Rossiné's adoption of Cubic Orphism was a transitory phase in his work – which makes his experimentation with light, rhythm and colour in this kaleidoscopic painting all the more rare.