Vladimir Baranov-Rossine
1888-1944
Born Shulim Wolf Leib Baranov in Kherson (modern-day Ukraine), Baranov-Rossine studied at the School of the Society for the Furthering of the Arts in St Petersburg, later attending the city’s Imperial Academy of Arts from 1903 to 1907.
In 1910 he moved to Paris where he was a resident in the artist’s colony La Ruche until 1914, together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Nathan Altman and others. He exhibited regularly in Paris after 1911.
Baranov-Rossine returned to Russia in 1914, exhibiting with the World of Art Group and, in 1918, with Jewish Society for the Furthering of the Arts, together with Altman, El Lissitzky and David Shterenberg. He participated at the First State Free Art Exhibition in Petrograd in 1919.
During a performance in 1924 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow he gave the first presentation of his optophonic piano– an instrument that was capable of creating sounds and coloured lights, patterns and textures simultaneously.
In 1925 he emigrated to France. Continuously experimenting, Baranov-Rossine applied the art of colour to the military sphere with the technique of camouflage, or the ‘chameleon process’. Baranov-Rossine is credited as a founder of pointillist or dynamic military camouflage.
During German occupation Baranov-Rossine was deported to Auschwitz, and died there in 1944.
