Pavel Tchelitchew
Russian, 1898-1957 (active USA)
The Green Lion , 1942
watercolor on board
40 1/4 × 30 in.
SBMA, Gift of Wright Ludington
1948.20.5
Pavel Tchelitchew photographed in 1934
RESEARCH PAPER
The Green Lion is a watercolor on watercolor board, done in l942 during Anton Tchelitchew's residency in the United States. Although he was not a Cubist, he frequently utilized one particular technique associated with Cubism: the use of multiple images, presented simultaneously. At the same time he demonstrates a technique of pulling together relatively dissimilar objects to create forms that merge and become one visual, regarded asmetamorphosis or visual punning. This is most apparent in Hide and Seek (Cache, Cache), his 6' x 7' oil in the Museum of Modern Art. The Green Lion is a watercolor copy of a small portion of the artist's monumental allegorical composition depicting the four seasons and correlating them to phases of human life.
The Green Lion represents the most productive period of life, Fall, when wheat becomes summer's harvest. An autumnal boy figure at the top has been aligned with Mercury. This watercolor was originally exhibited in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York before being presented to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art by Wright Ludington in 1948. Tchelitchew, born in Moscow on September 21, 1898, was brought up on his father's country estate near Kaluga and sent to boarding school in Moscow. He was a student at the University of Moscow in the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution. His fine draftsmanship was a result of early training in the 1920s with Alexander Exter, a pupil of Fernand Leger. Contact with Russian Constructivists such as El Lissitzky influenced his interest in theater design. Success in this field led to recognition as a talented landscape and portrait painter.
After World War I, Tchelitchew located in Berlin, center for the Russian avant-garde, where he crossed paths with Marc Chagall. By 1926, Tchelitchew was successfully exhibiting in Paris with a group of Neo-Romantics (Berman, Berard, Leonide, Kristians Tonny) and had become friend and confidant to both Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell. His reaction against Cubism and abstract painting surfaced. Despite the Neo-Romantic influence, Tchelitchew's strong sense of formal design and his balance of sentiment and intellectual complexity distinguished him from the others. He valued the pre-Cubist style of Picasso much more. Hide and Seek might be compared to Picasso's Geurnica in importance and impact in the body of work of this artist.
Tchelitchew began painting his metamorphic compositions in the late 1920s. By the middle of the Thirties in Italy, he had laid the ground work for Phenomena, rendering a monstrous and distorted symbolism of human society. Completed in 1938, this was his depiction of Hell. At this point, he immediately began to execute Hide and Seek, his conception of Purgatory. Although he continued painting, his work of Paradise was never begun; and the trilogy he had envisioned was not to be realized. By 1942 "the subjects of childhood and nature were ripe for saccharine, hackneyed interpretation." (Ivry, 1984) But despite this period of Walt Disney sweetness, Tchelitchew's were not idealized but portrayed with "visceral imagery." Childhood memories of tales of the Brothers Grimm had more impact on his Green Lion. His "spidery line creates a spooky effect familiar to the admirers of the drawings and typography of Edward Gorey." (ibid.)
The Green Lion portrays images which are not always immediately identifiable. Things the viewer presumes to be solid in the work are painted almost as illusion. Earthly bodies have a quality of airiness not actually attached to the surface. There exists "a figure-ground of ambiguity" (Gaggi, 1976) between children and nature. Children emerge and recede into space between wheat stalks. Surrounding leaves are spectators to the event, noisy ones at that. There is the image of a boy whose inverted body contains wheat (summer's harvest). Large overlapping stalks in the foreground suggest flatness of surface and appear to restrict the viewer's participation. While other wheat stalks move back into space, the viewer's eye follows a line upward to the figures in the background.In preliminary drawings, Tchelitchew "had conceived the wheat stalk as a weapon in the hands of the fighting boys. The final 'wheat figure' was mainly to express the pacific denouement of nature's struggle to create." (Tyler, 1967)
An earlier oil, Portrait of my Father, (1939) portrays an image of his father in the form of a lion or tiger's head, also merging with the landscape. (His father was a domineering figure in his childhood, breaking up frequent sibling scuffles between the artist and his brother.) As Rosamund Frost (1942) concludes: "In The Green Lion we see bodies in three perspectives, golden wheat given an almost emblematic importance, sun-pierced leaves which breakdown into individual angry faces, and the lion's head which surprised the artist more than anyone else." To deepen appreciation of this composition which involves triple perspective and hidden meanings, viewers need to approach it from various vantage points and return to it at a later time. Then they may just become metamorphisized themselves as Tchelitchew had perhaps intended. Known as the art of disegno, this technique was valued less as the century moved on. At the age of 58, Tchelitchew died virtually forgotten.
Prepared by Suzanne C. Mellichamp, April, l991
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books:
Kirztein, Lincoln. Pavel Tchelitchew Drawings New York: Hacker Bart Books, 1970
Roditi, Edouard. Dialogues on Art Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, 1980
Tyler, Parker. The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1967
Periodicals:
Frankfurter, Alfred M., "Tchelitchew Hides and You Seek," Art News, Vol.41, No. 12, November 1-14, 1942, pp. 18-19, 33
Frost, Rosamund, "Tchelitchew: Method in Magic," Art News, Vol. 41, No. 5, April 15-30, 1942, pp. 24-25, 32
Gaggi, Silvio, "Tchelitchew: The Synthesis of Oppositions," Art International, Vol. 20, No. 2-3, February-March, 1976, pp. 69-75
Ivry, Benjamin, "Forum: Pavel Tchelitchew, Study for Hide and Seek," Drawing, Vol. 6, No. 4, November-December, l984, pp. 82-83
Kirstein Lincoln, "The Interior Landscapes of Pavel Tchelitchew," Magazine of Art, Vol. 41, No. 2, February, 1948, pp. 49-53
Kirstein, Lincoln, "The Position of Pavel Tchelitchew;" Soby, James T., "Return to the North;" Tyler, Parker, "Tchelitchew's World," View, Vol.2, No. 2, May, l942 (Tchelitchew Issue)
Tyler Parker, "Pavel Tchelitchew," Art News, Vol. 56, No. 5, September, 1957, pp.26-27, 55