(Book by Tchelitchew, Pavel)
Book by Tchelitchew, Pavel
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Tchelitchew was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1989. He was the son of Fyodor Tchelitchew and Nadezhda Permyakov, wealthy aristocrats.
As a child, he was fascinated with the book illustrations of Gustave Doré.
In 1918 the family was forced to flee its estate in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. They settled in Kiev, Ukraine.
He was educated by private tutors. In Ukraine Pavel entered the school of painting and theater design operated by Alexandra Exter, a student of Fernand Léger. He also took private lessons with Basil Tchakrigine and Isaac Rabinovitch, two artists who worked in the constructivist-cubist manner.
In the fall of 1920 he left Russia by way of Istanbul and Sofia, for Berlin, where he lived for two years, executing theater sets for the ballet and opera. Then he moved to Paris, where he began to shed his cubist-derived style and return to the representational. At first he painted landscapes but soon turned to portraiture, producing self-portraits and interpretations of such friends as Nicolas Nabokov, Glenway Wescott, Margaret Anderson, and Allen Tanner. He favored a palette of pale blues and fuchias. One of these portraits and a still life were represented in the 1925 Salon d'Automne, where they attracted the attention of Gertrude Stein. She searched him out and invited him to her apartment, where he saw her superb collection. He was much moved by her blue-and pink-period Picassos. These thereafter influenced his choice of subject, manner of representing the figure, and use of color.
In 1926 Tchelitchew exhibited at the Galerie Druet in Paris with other figurative painters, including Christian Bérard, Kristians Tonnys, the Russian expatriates Eugene Berman and Léonide, and others. As a group that reaffirmed the centrality of the human figure in art, they offered a clear alternative to cubist abstraction, much expressionist painting, and most surrealism. Their work was often mysterious and dreamlike; one critic called it "neo-romantic. " Tchelitchew was considered the "chef-d'école. "
From about 1930 onward Tchelitchew developed a vocabulary of techniques and approaches to representation that was to give his art its particular stamp. Although he never joined the surrealist movement, like certain surrealists, Salvador Dali and Max Ernst in particular, he experimented with double imagery. Confronting such a work, the beholder would recognize some objects at once but identify others only upon further reflection. He also introduced exaggerated perspective and foreshortening. He would, for instance, show a reclining figure with the feet very close to the beholder so they would appear abnormally large. Thus, he projected a troubled state of mind, as if nature were being viewed by the mentally disturbed.
Between 1929 and 1932 Tchelitchew painted a series of circus figures, several conspicuously tattooed; tennis players; and bullfighters. He was winning great recognition. In 1928 he had his first one-man show, in London, and two years later, another in Paris. In the 1930's he painted portraits of socialites and such celebrities as Helena Rubinstein (attaching real sequins to the portrait); his lifelong companion and secretary, the poet Charles-Henri Ford; Lincoln Kirstein; and Dame Edith Sitwell, whom he had met through Gertrude Stein and who did much to establish his reputation in England. He was given his first one-man show in the United States in 1934, at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. Tchelitchew settled in America in 1938 and became an American citizen. In 1942 the Museum of Modern Art put on a large retrospective exhibition of his work and acquired Hide and Seek (1940 - 1942), a work considered by many to be his masterpiece. It and Phenomena (1936-1938; Moscow, Tretykov State Gallery) were conceived as two parts of a triad representing Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Phenomena reveals a broad, deep landscape peopled with a wide assortment of circus freaks and similarly distorted beings of the artist's invention. Most are peering out of the canvas. The color is shrill and spectral. When first shown in London, this painting scandalized the critics. Hide and Seek is an "interior landscape" that makes the most of multiple-image metamorphosis and complex and ambitious use of perspective. It is more lyrical and mysterious than Phenomena. One critic attacked its "shrill saccharine color and gelatinous symbolism. " Tchelitchew was working on plans for the third stage, the celestial, when he died.
In the 1940's he also painted a number of male heads composed entirely of illumined, glowing, transparent tubing against a dark ground. These recall the anatomical drawings of exposed nervous systems by Vesalius, but they also seem hallucinated and illusory. Throughout his career, Tchelitchew designed sets and costumes for the ballet, collaborating with Diaghilev, Balanchine, and others. A list of ballets on which he worked includes Ode (1929), L'Errante (1933), Orpheus (1936), St. Francis (1938), Ondine (1939), Balustrade (1941), and Apollon Musagète (1942). In 1949 he was given a large retrospective exhibition in Buenos Aires. In 1952 he left the United States to settle in Frascati, Italy. In his last years his health deteriorated, and he was in financial difficulties. His work slowed down as he became increasingly depressed. He died in Rome.
Among Tchelitchew's well-known paintings are portraits of Natalia Glasko, Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein and the works Phenomena (1936–1938) and Cache Cache (1940–1942). Tchelitchew designed sets for Ode (Paris, 1928), L'Errante (Paris, 1933), Nobilissima Visione (London, 1938) and Ondine (Paris, 1939).
(Book by Tchelitchew, Pavel)
