Pavel Tchelitchew

Paris, Galerie Rive Gauche, Les Peintures Recentes de Pavel Tchelitchew, November 1956, no. 14
New York, Gallery of Modern Art, Pavel Tchelitchew, March-April 1964, no. 326
Syracuse, Everson Museum of Art, Pavel Tchelitchew, September-October 1983
Katonah, Katonah Museum of Art, Pavel Tchelitchew: The Landscape of the Body, June-September 1998

Galerie Rive Gauche, Les Peintures Recentes de Pavel Tchelitchew, Paris, 1956, no. 14
Gallery of Modern Art, Pavel Tchelitchew, New York, 1964, p. 68, no. 326
Katonah Museum of Art, Pavel Tchelitchew: The Landscape of the Body, Katonah, 1998, p. 51

Oil on canvas. The surface is dirty and covered with a layer of slightly yellowed varnish. There is a very minor abrasion to the surface, perhaps from a frame tack, near the center of the right edge. There is a small stain in the lower left corner and minor buckling to canvas along upper edge. There is a very minor abrasion to the canvas surface in upper right corner. Under UV no pigments appear to fluoresce but varnish prevents a conclusive analysis. Held in a wood frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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From 1950 to 1956, Tchelitchew embarked on a series of Space Compositions, extensions of his earlier Interior Landscapes. Increasingly fascinated with the inner workings of the body, he represented the organism as a "filigrane of illuminated skeins, a net of linear tracks, rather than as a glassy or icy continuous, transparent surface" (Lincoln Kirstein, Gallery of Modern Art, Pavel Tchelitchew, 45). Varying colors signified different bodily elements: "Nerves traditionally are fiery red; bones are golden earth; lymph, watery green; veins and arteries, blue; the glandular system, celestial air unperturbed by wind or current, immobile, white. Blank spaces, left between the light tracks established rhythmically a depth in space and its plastic shape" (Ibid., 47).

It was in his Space Compositions that Tchelitchew truly let go of the corporeal world, trading anatomy for pure geometry. Physical forms devolved into pure bands of light, leaving behind mosaic-like patterns of light and darkness. Applying his characteristic metamorphic touch, Tchelitchew rendered these spiraling structures from varying viewpoints, thus emphasizing their perpetually agitated motion and affirming their lively, incandescent existence.