Baranoff-Rossiné, Vladimir

Baranoff-Rossiné, Vladimir (1888–1944). Russian painter, sculptor, musician, and experimental artist, born at Kherson in the Ukraine. After studying painting in St Petersburg he spent the years 1910 to 1916 in Paris, where he moved from Post-Impressionism to Cubism. An example of his sculpture of this period is Symphony No. 1 (MOMA, New York, 1913), a witty figure of a musician made of polychrome wood, cardboard, and crushed eggshells; it looks rather like a junk Archipenko. After the Russian Revolution Baranoff-Rossiné taught at various art institutions in Petrograd (St Petersburg) and (from 1919) Moscow. His work of this time included abstract paintings and constructions, some of them made from manufactured bits and pieces such as old gutter pipes, bedsprings, etc. He also constructed a ‘colour piano’ or ‘opto-phonic piano’ (Pompidou Centre, Paris, 1923) on which he gave ‘visual’ concerts intended to demonstrate a synthesis of music and the visual arts. After leaving Russia in 1925 he settled in Paris; he was arrested there by the Gestapo in 1943 and died in a prison camp the following year.