A visual Journey into the Bible The Book of Genesis

A Visual Journey into the Bible Page: 26
of Trent and pictures of Adam and Eve nude were not unusual. After all, the Bible
noted explicitly that Adam and Eve were naked and not ashamed. That was before the
Fall, as in Cranach’s picture. The clergy could hardly protest against a scene that had
a sound theological basis. Puritanism set in later. The Fall had a special meaning for
Luther and the Protestants. It underscored the frailness of humanity and original sin
and illustrated some of the pessimism of the Protestants. The Renaissance had
glorified man, built imposing monuments on majestic antique non-Christian
examples. The Roman Catholic Church all too eagerly liked pomp and outward
magnificence to show the power of its clergy more than the modesty of Christ. The
Protestants would remark that man had to pray and be humble again. If the
Renaissance tried to reach the skies, the German Protestants pointed at the reality of a
hard life that was often miserable in feudal Germany. Cranach made several versions
of the Fall, which became one of the preferred themes of the German Protestants.
Adam and Eve
Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné (1888 – 1942). Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza – Madrid.
1912.
The theme of Adam and Eve, representations of the first men but also types of all
mankind, inspired artists of later than the early centuries of oil painting and other
artists than of Western Europe. Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné was born in the Ukraine,
in the town of Kherson. He studied painting in Odessa and in Saint Petersburg. He
moved in the group of Russian avant-garde artists where he met Larionov and Natalia
Gontcharova among others. In 1910 Baranoff-Rossiné left Russia for Paris and tied
friendships with the Parisian society of Russian émigrés but also with Hans Arp and
Robert and Sonia Delaunay. From this period dates his ‘Adam and Eve’ in which the
influence of the aforementioned artists can be felt in the strong, heavy colours and the
encircling dynamism. Baranoff-Rossiné also sculpted and tended to a unity in the
various arts of painting, sculpture, poetry and music. He combined these arts in stage
performances. During the First World War he hid in Norway. He returned to Russia,
now a communist nation in the growing, already in 1917. He met Marc Chagall and
other Russian innovators of painting. In his later years Baranoff-Rossiné came back to
Paris and he died there in 1942, in the middle of a new World War. Until his death he
continued to experiment with colours.
Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné’s ‘Adam and Eve’ is all colours. His painting strikes with
its embedded, concentric circles between which colours and subjects are trapped. The
obsession of whirling circular movements that engulfed all subject matter was a
characteristic of a style of painting of the beginning of the twentieth century called
Orphism. The main artists who left the representation of figurative subjects for these
circling colours were Frantisek Kupka and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who all
worked in Paris. Baranoff-Rossiné’s ‘Adam and Eve’ can thus also be called an
Orphist picture, even though the Orphists tended to complete abstraction whereas
Baranoff-Rossiné remains mainly figurative in his painting.
For Baranoff-Rossiné the sun is the creator of life. It’s warm and red light is central. It
does not send out rays but life is created in concentric circles. All life is generated
Copyright ©: René Dewil Date: October, 24 2000