D ating from Pavel Tchelitchew’s American period, The Kite is a version in oil of an earlier gouache, which forms part of the artist’s small but important Spanish cycle. This series was inspired by a trip to Spain in the summer of 1934 together with his partner, the American poet Charles Henri Ford, whom he had met in Paris a couple of years earlier, and the British photographer Cecil Beaton.

It was in the Spanish works that Tchelitchew first started to experiment with what has been called the “triple perspective.” The artist would place figures seen from different viewpoints in one pictorial plane, resulting in a distorted perspective and extreme foreshortening, as is the case here with the boy in the foreground. Other important examples demonstrating this new approach are the three gouaches on the theme of bullfight sold at Sotheby’s London and New York in 2015 (fig. 1). The use of this compositional device would reoccur in Tchelitchew’s paintings from his American period and would reach its culmination in his most ambitious and certainly most controversial painting, Phenomena (fig 1).

According to the listing in the catalogue Portraits by Pavel Tchelitchew, Levy exhibited the gouache version at his gallery in 1937. It is possible that Levy also commissioned the artist to paint the present oil. In any case it was him who later loaned it to Tchelitchew’s first retrospective which took place at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942.

The artist’s palette was also undergoing significant changes. Already in the early 1930s, while still in Paris, he began to abandon the muted colors of his earlier, often monochrome paintings, a change which became more radical following his visit to Spain. The various hues of ochre, blue and red used in his Spanish works are also typical of Tchelitchew’s American period. The artist first arrived in New York in late October 1934 for a visit with Ford. He would eventually settle there, attracted by America’s enthusiasm for modern art, its forward-thinking gallerists and an impressive circle of friends and admirers, which included Julien Levy, Monroe Wheeler, Lincoln Kirstein and George Platt Lynes.

In December 1934, he already had his first American solo exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery on Madison Avenue. Levy would go on to organize several exhibitions of Tchelitchew’s work throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, when his gallery was the place to see Surrealist art in the United States. In early 1932, for example, Levy had organized a seminal group show at which Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931, MoMA) was exhibited for the very first time.