Pavel Tchelitchew at Michael Rosenfeld - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Pavel Tchelitchew's ethereal, ecorche gouache portraits are prime examples of the "shock of the old" These "inner landscapes" from the late 1940 gaze completely contemporary and seem uneven precursors of Kiki Smith's material substance works and the psychedelic portraits of Alex Grey Revealing mysterious imaginary a whole s of blood vessels and powers these drawings blend the subjective emotions of material part art with a darkly chthonic view of nature that would appeal to Camille Paglia. A blue-gray wash shapes the head in Interior Landscape (1949) mitigating the scratchy, ominous ink lines of the cranium and teeth. Heavenly Child XII (1950) is an example of Tchelitchew's intriguing late work, which ofttimes depicts complex linear systems within human heads. in these eerie drawings, he was able to make smooth abstraction fit into his anthropomorphic vision of the world.

This small display of paintings and drawings touched upon most of the phases in the drawn out and complex career of this Russian-born artist (1898-1957) who was a favorite of the largely gay coterie that rul a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of New York's pre-Ab Ex art world. Although in 1942 supposeed worthy of a fullscale mid-career MOMA retrospective, Tchelitchew is today chiefly remembered for Hide-and-seek, a translucent, polymorphous nature painting in the Modern's collection. In his be in possession of time, Tchelitchew's quirky personality alienated many of the society patrons (most notably Gertrude Stein) upon whom he was forced to be pendent financially. Furthermore, critics were lay off by his radical stylistic move rounds particularly by the series leading up to his 1939 bomb of a painting, Phenomenon, a composite cosmography that incudes such figures as Christian Berard, Edith Sitwell and Virgil Thompson caricatured as circus freaks.

In this exhibition, a gouache close attention for that painting, Sleeping Pinheads (1935) depicts sum of two units agonized freaks sleeping on hospital gown upon a crude stone floor. With farthest foreshortening, Tchelitchew sticks the striped sock of single directly in the viewer's face. like rude gestures went against the grain of the polite "Neo-romantic" change in which the artist had been shapeless massed The brave and sensational Phenomenon should be rescu from the profunditys of Moscow's National Tretyakov Gallery, where it has languished unobserved for almost 30 years.

simple bodys of Symbolism, Surrealism and modernism advance together in Tchelitchew's work, informed by dint of a spirit of true iconoclasm. verdant Clown (1929) is a capricious and sensuous anthropomorphic portrait, the clown's limbs and torso crawling with miniature contorted, acrobatic bodies. An allegorical snowscape, R Riding cowl (1940), teems with hidden anthropomorphic silhouettes. Like not divisible by 2 and paranoid Russian folktales, his narratives slowly reveal ominous figures lurking not single in the woodwork but beneath the skin. Tchelitchew's stunning technique, his upfront homoeroticism and his heartfelt confrontation with the physical world combine to make him an artist ripe for historical rehabilitation. Today's art world can cope with the morbid perversity of this work.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group