Pavel Tchelitchew at the Katonah Museum - Brief Article

Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Jonathan Goodman

Technically gifted, mystically inclined, Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957) was deemed a major artist in the 1930s and '40s; however, his quirky, sometimes mannered, often homoerotic art fell into disrepute during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, when the heroic gesture left little room for sensitivity, especially the figurative kind. This thorough overview of Tchelitchew's work, the artist's first museum exhibition since 1964, enabled viewers to consider the genuine achievement of an extremely versatile and accomplished artist.

Tchelitchew led a life in exile. The first son of a Russian landowner, he moved with his family to Kiev after their estate near Moscow was lost in 1918, during the Russian Revolution. He roamed Europe, spending time in Berlin and Paris, where he was exposed to such movements as Surrealism and Expressionism, which later informed his art. In 1934 he moved to New York, where he spent most of the rest of his life.

Much of Tchelitchew's persuasiveness as an artist is due to his formal skills. His brilliant draftsmanship is evident in his figuration, such as the 1935 pen-and-ink studies for Phenomena (1936-38). One drawing, of a raving peasant woman, has a Breughel-like grimness which seems to foreshadow the horrific events of World War II. Phenomena, which is in the collection of the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow and has not been seen in America since 1964, is a major work. It is a visually complex, thematically vast portrayal of historical figures such as Hitler and Mussolini, along with circus oddities, hermaphrodites and pinheads--the imagery was influenced by Tchelitchew's visits to a 14th Street freak show--set in a barren landscape framed by impersonal urban architecture. The work now looks brilliantly postmodern, ahead of its time. He also produced powerful portraits, including likenesses of such friends as Lincoln Kirstein, Edith Sitwell and Ruth Ford. A multifigure 1937 portrait shows Kirstein in a red-and-black baseball jacket, wearing a suit and reading the paper, and nude but for a pair of boxing gloves. The composition emphasizes the combative intelligence of the poet and ballet enthusiast.

The subtitle of the exhibition, "The Landscape of the Body," pointed out Tchelitchew's penchant for anthropomorphizing nature, seen in such paintings as Landscape of My Father (1939) and Fata Morgana (1940). He was above all an allegorical artist; these works, along with Hide-and-Seek (Cache-Cache), 1940-42, an inspired parable of children seeking their fortune within the enveloping arms of a ghostly tree, portray human endeavor as essentially mysterious, beyond conscious control.

In the late '40s Tchelitchew began to work out visions of the body schematized by simplified linear geometries. Inacheve (1957), his unfinished last work, is a barely discernible head composed of circles and ellipses in yellow against a complex background of golden nets. The painting effects an impersonal but still metaphorical vision of life beyond death.

Michael Duncan, the show's curator, points out that Tchelitchew's "formal experimentation, grim social vision, sexually frank subject matter, and internalized depiction of nature no longer seem out of step with the times." Tchelitchew's preoccupation with the figure, both for its symbolic possibilities and its innate erotic expressiveness, looks ahead to our current interest in the body as the ground of metaphor and form.