Visual Propaganda #7 (Mother Russophilia Special): Pavel Tchelitchew

In lieu of another sickening Liberal hysteria driven censorship push, we celebrate the glorious achievements of Russian artists, this time with Russian exile Pavel Tchelitchew

Pavel Tchelitchew was Russian by birth, born in the Dubrovska province in 1898, during the end of the Russian empire. His family was aristocratic. And thus, when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in 1917, he and his family was forced to flee the country under the threat of execution. He was interested in ballet and visual art at an early age and studied under the Russian/French painter and designer Alexandra Ekster at the Kiev Academy.

Despite Tchelitchew’s exile from his home country, he intriguingly shares much overlap with many of the artists that did in fact live and work through the Stalinist regime. Once Stalin took power, for instance, all fine art that failed to conform to the aesthetic of Soviet realism was branded as bourgeois and decadent. Artists who opted towards a more modernist, surreal, or symbolist aesthetic then preferred to work in the theater, as set designers and otherwise where they had more freedom to realize the full extents of their imaginations. Tchelitchew was an unabashed surrealist and is equally known for his paintings AND his set and costume designs for the theater and the ballet. He collaborated with the American-Georgian ballet choreographer George Balanchine and the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diagheliev who was also forced to live in exile after being declared embodying of the bourgeois decadence that the Soviets believed had plagued Russian society prior to the revolution.

We should almost be thankful for Tchelitchew’s exile from his own country, because his seismic creative talent and ability to conjure the images that reside deep within the psyche was equal to the greatest of the surrealist painters of the early 20th Century and would have been shackled by the aesthetic restrictions of the Soviet regime. His work almost looks something like the dark other of Marc Chagall’s colorfully chaotic scenes. Tchelitchew painted luridly sexualized anamorphic landscapes, geometric deconstructions of human heads that seem to portend the psychedelic imagery that wouldn’t become popularized until decades after his death, and erotically charged images of men befitting of his open homosexuality. In paintings like The Sun from 1945, Tchelitchew shuns images all together for patterns and shapes of color that, while not exactly abstract, imagine the kaleidoscopic images that reside behind the closed human eye while enduring the effects of a potent LSD trip. His work is rife with allusion to death, to sex, to the inner conflict of being a soul trapped within decaying matter.

Alas, exiled or not, Tchelitchew’s artistic identity is still nigh impossible to separate from his Russian beginnings, and he was undoubtedly one of the greatest of the many Counter-Agents of the Avant-Garde produced by the country.

Images
1. Pavel Tchelitchew Hide and Seek (1942)
2. Pavel Tchelitchew The Sun (1945)
3. Pavel Tchelitchew Untitled (Head) (1949)
4. Pavel Tchelitchew Untitled (1945)
5. Pavel Tchelitchew Personage (1947)
6. Pavel Tchelitchew The One Who Fell, (Final Study) (1930)
7. Pavel Tchelitchew Untitled (Couple and Red Cloaks) (1935)
8. Pavel Tchelitchew The Concert (1933)
9. Pavel Tchelitchew Jesus visiting souls in Purgatory
10. Pavel Tchelitchew Peinture objet (1926)