Pavel Tchelitchew

John E. Abbot, New York
G.H.P. Williams, New York
Christie’s New York, Impressionist and Modern Paintings and Sculpture, 17 May 1984, lot 388
Previously in the Georges Bemberg Collection

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Tchelitchew: Paintings and Drawings, 1942, no.33
New York, Gallery of Modern Art, Pavel Tchelitchew, 20 March - 19 April 1964, no.100
New York, Midtown Payson Gallery, Pavel Tchelitchew: A Reevaluation, 21 September - 5 November 1994

Exhibition catalogue Tchelitchew: Paintings and Drawings, New York, 1942, p.58, no.33 illustrated
Exhibition catalogue Pavel Tchelitchew, New York, 1964, p.18, no.13 illustrated b/w; p.59, no.100 listed

Théâtre Français is part of a series of theatre scenes Tchelitchew executed in Paris in 1931. In the 1942 exhibition catalogue James Thrall Soby refers to the series as The Loges and lists two other paintings from this group. As with Toulouse-Lautrec and other Post-Impressionist artists he admired, Tchelitchew saw theatre as a spectacle which takes place both on stage and in the audience. 

Theatre, according to impresario Lincoln Kirstein, was Tchelitchew’s ‘early passion which continued to amuse him most of his life’ (Pavel Tchelitchew, New York, 1964, p.7). He began working for the theatre early on in his career, producing costume and set designs as an apprentice in Kiev. Among his important forays into the ballet world are for the 1923 production of Coq d’Or at the Berlin State Opera and Leonide Massine's Ode, staged by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1928. 

In Théâtre Français, ‘the artist opposed several of his typical, stylized heads to a head realistically drawn almost to the point of caricature – the head of the old man with the opera glasses (said to be the artist, Henri Matisse)’ (J.T.Soby in Tchelitchew: Paintings and Drawings, New York, 1942, p.23). The present lot was the only work from the 1931 theatre series to have been included in the seminal 1942 exhibition of Tchelitchew’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. According to the exhibition catalogue, it was at the time owned by John E. Abbot, executive Vice-President and later secretary of the museum.