Pavel Tchelitchew at the Katonah Museum - Brief Article

Technically gifted, mystically inclined, Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957) was judgeed a major artist in the 1930 and '40s; however, his quirky, sometimes mannered, oftentimes homoerotic art fell into disrepute during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, when the heroic action 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 l a life in exile. The first son of a Russian landowner, he mov with his family to Kiev after their estate near Moscow was not to be found in 1918, during the Russian Revolution. He roamed Europe spending time in Berlin and Paris, where he was expos to of the like kind movements as Surrealism and Expressionism, which later informed his art. In 1934 he mov to novel York, where he spent greatest in quantity of the rest of his life.

plenteous of Tchelitchew's persuasiveness as an artist is owed to his formal skills. His brilliant draftsmanship is evident in his figuration, similar as the 1935 pen-and-ink studies for Phenomena (1936-38) single drawing, of a raving peasant woman, has a Breughel-like grimness which strike one as beings to foreshadow the horrific incidents 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 manifold thematically vast portrayal of historical figures of that kind as Hitler and Mussolini, along with circus oddities, hermaphrodites and pinheads--the imagery was influenced by the agency of Tchelitchew's visits to a 14th public way freak show--set in a barren landscape framed by means of impersonal urban architecture. The work now direct the eyes brilliantly postmodern, ahead of its time. He also produc powerful portraits, including likenesses of of the like kind friends as Lincoln Kirstein, Edith Sitwell and tenderness Ford. A multifigure 1937 portrait present to views Kirstein in a red-and-black baseball jacket, wearing a suit and reading the paper, and stark naked but for a pair of boxing glove The composition emphasizes the combative intelligence of the author of poems and ballet enthusiast.

The subtitle of the exhibition, "The Landscape of the Body" pointed on the outside Tchelitchew's penchant for anthropomorphizing nature, seen in of that kind 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 of the soul tree, portray human endeavor as essentially mysterious, beyond conscious control

In the late '40 Tchelitchew began to work without visions of the body schematized by the agency of simplified linear geometries. Inacheve (1957) his unfinished last work, is a barely discernible head compos of circles and ellipses in gold-colored against a complex background of of gold nets. The painting effects an impersonal on the other hand still metaphorical vision of life beyond death.

Michael Duncan, the show's curator, points without that Tchelitchew's "formal experimentation, grim social vision, sexually frank control matter, and internalized depiction of nature no longer have the appearance out of step with the times." Tchelitchew's preoccupation with the figure, one as well as the other for its symbolic possibilities and its innate erotic expressiveness, direct the eyes ahead to our current interest in the material part as the ground of metaphor and form.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group