TCHELITCHEV, Pavel 1898 - 1957
20th Century
American School
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH ALLEN TANNER, circa 1924-28
Dimensions: 9 3/8” x 8 1/8” (23.8 x 20.6 cm)
On verso of backing label printed: MIDTOWN PAYSON GALLERIES, typed: Artist, title, dimensions, medium.
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| Pavel Tchelitchev, born in Moscow and educated in Moscow and Kiev, came via Odessa and Sofia to Berlin in 1921. In 1923 he was commissioned to design sets and costumes for Rimsky-Korsakow’s Le Coq d’Or at the Berlin State Opera. The poor reception of the production and an attack in the street for speaking French contributed to the artist’s decision to move to Paris.
Allen Tanner, a pianist from Chicago, shared Tchelitchev’s life in Berlin and Paris between 1923 and 1934. The two men separated after Tanner had organized an exhibition in the Chicago Arts Club to launch Tchelitchev’s career in America. They continued to exchange letters, and Tanner resumed his musical career, living in New York in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and later in Belleville, Illinois, where he died in 1987.
The present drawing dates from the early twenties in Paris, where Tchelitchev came into his own as a portraitist whose wild eccentricity brought him close to Surrealism. Lincoln Kirstein wrote about this period:
“After making trial-sketches of himself, Tchelitchev felt free to ask friends to sit. He would become one of the most varied and memorable portraitists of his epoch. Some one-hundred portraits include, among the most memorable, those of James Joyce, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, Charles and Ruth Ford, Peter Watson etc.” In 1924 the artist exhibited in Paris a large portrait painting of Allen Tanner, depicting the pianist in a straightforward pose en face, at roughly the same age as in the present drawing. A Self-Portrait by Tchelitchev, undated, illustrated in Kirstein’s monograph, leaves no doubt that the person with the sketch pad in the present drawing is indeed the artist himself.
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