BARANOFF-ROSSINÉ, VLADIMIR (1888-1942) Female Nude c. 1925 Oil on canvas, 99.5 by 73 cm. Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist's family. Private collection, France. Authenticity certificate from Dmitri Baranoff-Rossiné, the artist's son. In the 1920s the colourful utopianism of Vladimir Baranoff- Rossiné's sketches from the immediate post-revolutionary period was replaced by a striving to achieve a multi-sensory effect, merging colour, movement and music in one work. Baranoff-Rossiné's works were in tune with the trend of the time — the ambitious aspirations of the Futurists, the colour dynamics of Aristarkh Lentulov's works, the gliding sense of light in Mikhail Larionov's Rayonism — and he skilfully adapted innovative devices of the different styles characteristic of the interna- tional Ecole de Paris: Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Cubo- Futurism. Female Nude, which has been kept in the artist's family until now, is a typical example of the artist's work in this respect. Here the nude female figure is interpreted in the spirit of late Cubism, but Cubist breakdown of form is confined to the background (a quite common feature of the artist's paintings), with almost no deformation of the model's body. Light-bearing geometric forms cluster around the woman's head and shoulders, thus keeping in the background the Cubist elements which at times are projected right through the model's flesh. The pictorial plane of the background appears to break up, fragmenting into separate object-planes of different colours with their own texture, resulting in a harmonious play of modulations in a red and brown colour range. Both the model and the Cubist background are merely a pretext for arranging harmonious and elegant gradations of colour. Such use of colour, free of constraints of a particular style, may reflect the peculiarly incorporeal, immaterial quality of Baranoff- Rossiné's vision of colour, somewhat similar to the treatment of colour by Vassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall. It is not by accident that he wrote to Robert Delon about “dynamic painting of light”, convinced that “live painting in time must be an end in itself ”. Like the similar compositions Orpheus I and Orpheus II, Female Nude presented here has none of the bright and chaotic colours found in many of Baranoff-Rossiné's paintings of that period. The painting reveals the influence that his experience in Paris had on him. As an artistic movement, Cubism had an increasing influence on artists' thinking and inevitably attracted Baranoff-Rossiné, who responded to the zeitgeist with Cubist Nude, Nude with Hat, Reclining Nude and other similar works. Alongside the classically precise lines of Picasso, Baranoff-Rossiné's rhythmical structures appear somewhat fragmented and excessively painterly. At the same time, they express with full force the concepts of dynamic painting and total musicality which excited the artist. In Female Nude these shape the artist's rare ability to purify light and harmonise the shades of white, brown and red, imbued with a deep pervasive luminescence. Here the artist's focus is not so much on play with commonly occurring forms, as on the mood of introspection, the sense of absurdity and the intangibility of dreams. His Cubist nudes would soon be replaced by the surrealist studies of women of the late 1920s — a tribute to a new trend which Baranoff-Rossiné could not pass by.