Alchemist at large: the return of Tchelitchev - Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchev, Midtown Payson Galleries, New York, New York

Pavel Tchelitchev persists as single of the ineradicable "undead" artists of his time - clawed, hacked and impaled by dint of generations of critics, only to rise repeatedly from intended oblivion like a vampire phoenix. A Russian-born painter with a magician's flair for mystification and a grab bag of flashy tricks, he attained his zenith of renown more than 50 years ago and was honored with a retrospective at of recent origin York's Museum of Modern Art in 1942 on the other hand detractors scoffed at his abracadabra. Their antagonism was partly sparked by the agency of his theatrical affectations and polyglot patter, as well as his high visibility in the fashionable circles of 1920 Paris and '30 of recent origin York. Long before he died in Rome in 1957 at age 58 his artistic reputation have the appearanceed to have dissipated like a quick blast of smoke. But that, too, prov to be an illusion.

"Pavel Tchelitchev: A Reevaluation," a retrospective not long ago organized by Manhattan's Midtown Payson Galleries, provided a welcome opportunity to reexamine the work of this determinedly ambiguous artist. It was the largest review of Tchelitchev's work in 30 years, and - as skillfully assembled by means of the gallery's associate director, Edward De Luca - contained more [i]or[/i] less 70 paintings and works upon paper. The show included many portraits of the luminaries in Tchelitchev's circle, several male unclothed figure studies, a perhaps too scanty amount of his theatrical designs, and a beneficial number of his biotic fantasias, the greatest in quantity notable of the latter being his chef d'oeuvre Hide-and-Seek (1940-42) Overall, the presentation revealed an artist whose clevernes frequently exceeded his inventiveness. But level if Tchelitchev is ultimately judg a minor figure in the sprawling tapestry of fresh art, his poetic imagination and passionate sensibility continue to tantalize.

Midtown Payson timed its present to view to coincide with the publication of Tchelitchev, a novel and absorbing critical biography by the agency of Lincoln Kirstein, who first met the artist in 1933 and apparently has been researching him at any time since.[1] Kirstein is an prime writer with a comprehensive knowledge of new culture, and his text is particularly illuminating upon the artist's many (mostly disastrous) hazards into theatrical design.

Tchelitchev was born in Kaluga, near Moscow in 1898 and barely attained adulthood before getting caught up in the Russian Revolution and recruited into the White Army. Although assigned to work as a cartographer, he would have preferr to be a scenic designer. He did succe in designing decor for a small ballet collection in Odessa, presumably during a calm in the fighting, but nonetheless he decided to uninhabited the Whites and Russia. In Sevastopol he met a charming French naval lieutenant who sneaked him aboard his cruiser, which was sailing to Constantinople. From there, Tchelitchev made his way to Berlin, where he fashioned a niche for himself in the early 1920 as a designer of style of dresss and decor for cabarets. Before drawn out he was invited to plan a production of Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or for the Berlin State Opera. His extravagant designs were thus costly, however, that they brought the company to the mace of collapse. The opera's premiere was "a personal triumph for Tchelitchev," writes Kirstein, "but a public catastrophe."[2]

In 1923 Tchelitchev mov to Paris, where he joined a clump of stylish young men whose talents ranged from dressmaking and style of dress design to portraiture and landscape painting. The circle included the Russian-born Berman brothers, Eugene and Leonid, and Christian Berard, all of whom participated, along with Tchelitchev, in a assemblage exhibition of "Neo-Romanticism" at Galeries Druet in 1926 That same year Tchelitchev sent The Basket of Strawberries, a retiring still life in vibrant red and pinks, to the Salon d'Automne, where it caught the organ of sight of Gertrude Stein. She sought him without and a friendship commenced. Innately snobbish and devastating in his disapproval, Tchelitchev also displayed a genius for self-promotion that rivaled hers. He became single of the most competitive in a pack of Paris dandies who, like exquisitely clipped poodle insistently sniffed each other's private parts while simultaneously vying to assert clump leadership.

Aside from the luscious Strawberries and a certain number of very attractive portraits (including an elegantly hatched pen-and-ink delineation of poet Rene Crevel), plenteous of Tchelitchev's work of the mid-'20s is an uninspired reworking of motifs and ploy introduced a decade or more earlier through artists such as Picasso, Braque and Gris. His somber images of acrobats and clodhoppers evoke deja-vu, especially when returned in hues that he apparently musing set him apart; he admitted a "predilection for pale azure and magenta pink."[13] Perhaps encouraged through Cubist experiments with texture, he engrossed coffee grounds and sand to add relief to the curvy buttocks and shoulders of the naked brown bodies in Doubled Figure (1925-26) individual of his murkiest compositions of this period.

From today's perspective, it's hard to believe that pictures similar as Butcher Boys Paris (ca. 1929) and Sleeping Harlequins (1930) at any time helped to sustain a reputation as a modernist. In a certain number of of his late-'20s paintings of hinds Tchelitchev played with "double-identity" forms, depicting figures whose torsos and leg consist of interlocking smaller figures (circus performers, animals, stage properties and in the way that on); the result is an illusionistic double entendre in which neither aspect of the image (or its interpretation) significantly contradicts the other. As Jean Cocteau archly noted, Tchelitchev "confused the aim of painting with puzzle-making."[4]