Tchelitchew, Pavel
Pavel Tchelitchew was born on his family estate, 200 miles south-west from Moscow, in the Kaluga province of the Russian Empire in 1898. He started to draw and paint at the very early age taking inspiration from the reproductions of Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and attend a children’s art school in Moscow from 1907. Later on, his father allowed Pavel to subscribe to lavishly illustrated World of Art magazine and to take lessons at the art studio of Adolf Milman, the member of Jack of Diamonds group, in 1917.
Fleeing Bolsheviks to Kyiv in 1918 Tchelitchew attended classes at Alexandra Exter (1882-1949) art studio and enrolled in the newly opened Ukrainian State Academy of Arts. He also designed set and costumes for theatre productions and street posters. Escaping the Soviet Revolution, Tchelitchew travelled to Constantinople in 1919 and Sofia, Bulgaria in 1920 settling in Berlin, Germany in 1921 working as a theatre and cabaret designer. Pavel had his show of theatrical works in Berlin in 1923 and showed his oil paintings at a collective show in London in 1924 and the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1925.
His palette became more diverse and colourful when Pavel moved to New York in 1934 where he lived till 1950. During his American years, his artistic career continued to blossom. Tchelitchew had frequent personal exhibitions in commercial galleries showing his new ‘metamorphic’ figures and ‘internal’ landscapes and had his first major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1942 and another one in the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires in 1949. Tchelitchew moved to Italy in 1950 where he created some very complex and rare ‘spiral’ compositions which saw the culmination of his successful artistic career. Pavel Tchelitchew works are present at Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Tate Gallery and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, State Tretyakov Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris among the others.
