Costume design for a geisha. Kiev 1920. W/c on paper, signed low right in Cyrillic and dated. Exhibited: Alex Zachary Gallery New York November 25 - December 23, 2011 Another variant of the costume is reproduced in HUDOJNIKI RUSSKOGO TEATRA 1880-1930. Sobranie Lobanovyh-Rostovskih.Katalog-Reso ne. J. Bowlt. Iskusstvo, Moscow
1994, #867 p.272.

ITEM #TCHOA1
$5000

 Costume design for a dancer with chains. Enterprise Zimin, Stambul 1920-21. W/c on paper, signed low left in Cyrillic. Exhibited: Alex Zachary Gallery New York November 25 - December 23, 2011 Another variant of the costume is reproduced in   HUDOJNIKI RUSSKOGO TEATRA 1880-1930. Sobranie Lobanovyh-Rostovskih.Katalog-Reson
e. J. Bowlt. Iskusstvo, Moscow 1994, #878 p.274

ITEM #TCHOA2
$5000

Male nude sprawling in chair, dark brown wash on paper, 16 1/8 x10 ½ inches c 1930 Provenance: Allen Tunner collection (COA by Allen Tunner on the back); William Chambers, New York Illustrated in David Leddick The Homoerotic Art of Pavel Tchelitchew 1929-1939, Asphodel Editions, Elisium Press, 1999, 1/1000 page 19.

Spangled Head [Portrait of Charles Henry Ford under snow], watercolor, gouache encrusted with sequins on illustration board, 30x20 in., signed P. Tchelitchew and inscribed 35 II/Chicago (lower right), also inscribed Spangled / Head / P Tchelitchew 1935 / Chicago / to store until my return / in Nov 1949 (verso). Bibliography: “A Time to Gather… Russian Art From Foreign Private collections”, State Russian Museum, Saint-Petersburg, Palace Editions,2008, illustrated on p.22; Art+Auction, March 2008, illustrated on p. 83.

In original American beginning of 20th century Art Nouveau style gesso and hand-carved parcel gilded cassette frame by A. E. Schneider, Seattle ()label on the back). Enclosed is a postcard written by the sitter Charles Henri Ford, a poet and a writer and brother of actress Ruth Ford, autograph note signed, New York, 22 December 1975, to fellow poet Diane di Prima, asking her to send a postcard with message and stamped for his exhibition. He instructs her to send it to him (his name) so this has both a printed and a script autograph. Interestingly, the card he selected is of a work by Pavel Tchelitchew, then deceased but had been Ford's longtime lover. Compare: another example of the same collage technique with sequins in portrait of Helena Rubinstein - Paintings. Drawings. Text by Thrall Soby. Museum of Modern Art, NY. 1942, #38, p.63  

 [Penis adventures]. Numbered 805 in red on the verso. India ink on paper. c. 1930 . 11 x 9".

ITEM #TCHOA5
PRICE ON REQUEST

PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER Signed P. Tchelitchew (lower right) Oil on canvas 19 by 24 1/8 in. 48.3 by 61.3 cm Painted in 1939. In original gulided frame with silk velvet insert  chosen by the artist. PROVENANCE Lincoln Kirstein, New York (acquired directly from the artist); SOTHEBY’S New york Sale 06 May 2010 lot 381. EXHIBITIONS: New York, Museum of Modern Art, Tchelitchew, 1942, no. 50, illustrated in the catalogue;New York, Gallery of Modern Art, Pavel Tchelitchew, 1964, no. 23, illustrated in the catalogue LITERATURE Lincoln Kirstein, Tchelitchev, Santa Fe, 1994, no. 54, illustrated in color, n.p. CATALOGUE NOTE (Sotheby’s) Born into an aristocratic Russian family in 1898, Pavel Tchelitchev, after fleeing the Russian Revolution, arrived in Paris in 1923. There he saw the paintings of Picasso, Gris and Braque, and met luminaries such as Gertrude Stein and Charles Henri Ford, the Surrealist poet who would become his lifelong partner. In 1934, Tchelitchev and Ford moved to New York, and in 1942 The Museum of Modern Art gave Tchelitchev his first solo exhibition, which included the present work. Painted in 1939 at the height of his artistic career, Portrait of My Father is a highly personal work, which reflects the salient themes of his earlier pictures, and foreshadows what would become the artist's most celebrated canvas, Hide and Seek (Cache-cache), painted the following year, now in the collection of the Museum of  Modern Art in New York.  In 1938 Tchelitchev was given a studio in an 18th century farmhouse designed for him by Alice de Lamar, an amateur architect who lived in Weston, Connecticut. Here the artist became captivated by the rural landscape of New England. He made numerous highly detailed studies of the trees, leaves and hills, and gradually, images of children and animals began to emerge. The idea of metamorphosis was one that preoccupied Tchelitechev a decade earlier in Paris, encouraged in part by the Surrealists. Inspired by their interest in ambiguous images, as well as by the double-picture postcards that were popular in Russia when he was a child, Tchelitchev produced a number of works in which figures were concealed within figures, and images were compiled together to create a larger composition. In Portrait of My Father, the snow covered hills become a tiger, an image of the artist's father inspired, in part, by the snowy landscape of his childhood in Russia. James Thrall Soby writes, "Tchelitchew...has always considered that metamorphosis must contribute to fixed structure, that it must be used as a kind of interior magic, creating its own mystery and awe but never becoming the dominant illusion. He wishes the observer to be able to go back and forth easily between hidden images and the composition which contains them, never losing one in seeing the other" (Tchelitchew, New York, 1942, p. 19). The present work was given by the artist to Lincoln Kirstein, the collector and founder of the American Ballet, where it hung in his home until his death. Unusually in Tchelitchew's oeuvre there exist two paintings with the same title, Portrait of my Father. The other version is a powerful anthropomorphic allegory, an evocative rendering of Tchelitchew's early surroundings. The central figures of the children are surrounded by the forest, a symbol for Tchelitchew's father, while all around human faces and animals emerge from the wintry Russian landscape of his childhood. Images of the artist's father are embedded in the leopard and polar bear in the background, and in the cat and the boulder in the foreground, which provides several profiles. As Tchelitchew himself recalled, 'In early 1939, I made an oil painting of a snow landscape with children, the landscape itself being a composition of polar bear and leopard in combat. I perceived a great resemblance between landscapes and snowy hills and animals.' It has been suggested that many of the motifs of the work evolved from studies and sketches that Tchelitchew was creating for his monumental masterpiece, and one of his most celebrated works, Hide-and-Seek, 1940-1942, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

HEAD oil on canvas variously labeled (on the reverse) 32 by 23 1/2 in., 81.5 by 59.5 cm c 1949
PROVENANCE: Property from the Collection of Ruth Ford and Charles Henri Ford;
Sale Sotheby's Arcade, New York, February 24, 1995, lot 104;
Acquired directly from the above sale by the previous owner; Sale IMPORTANT RUSSIAN ART Sotheby New York, November 4, 2010, lot 37, illustrated.

{That portrait evidently represents a new direction started in 1949 of the artist works named by himself "Interior landscapes"  - another example is illustrated to the right and lower as items #TCHOA7d, #TCHOA4d}

THREE HEADS (PORTRAIT OF RENÉ CREVEL) signed P. Tchelitchew (lower right) and dated [19]26; variously inscribed and labeled (on the stretcher) oil on canvas MEASUREMENTS 18 3/4 by 14 1/2 in., 48 by 37 cm PROVENANCE: Property from the Collection of Ruth Ford and Charles Henri Ford; Collection Gertrude Stein; Galerie de Beaune, Paris; Estate of Ralph Church, Santa Barbara; Sale: Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, January 20, 1973, lot 87; Estate of Richard van Every; Sale: Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, December 14, 1976, lot 33, illustrated; Acquired directly from the above sale by the previous owner; Sale IMPORTANT RUSSIAN ART Sotheby New York, November 4, 2010, lot 35, illustrated. EXHIBITED: Galerie Druet, Paris February 22- March 5 1926 #48 in the catalog;  Syracuse, Everson Museum of Art, Pavel Tchelitchew, September-October 1983; "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Gard,."San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Grand Palais in Paris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011 and 2012,#433 in  the exhibition catalogue, illustrated as plate 190.In “Tchelitchew Paintings. Drawings”   Museum of Modern Art, NY 1942  Thrall Soby wrote: In the fall of 1925 Tchelitchew had attempted his own solution of a problem which had engrossed abstract painters of the older generation, particularly Picasso, and which had supplied one of the most persistent themes in 20^th century paintings: the simultaneous presentation of several different aspects of the human head and figure… His conscience was on the side of psychological interpretation rather than abstract design, and in his portrait of Rene Crevel painted late in 1925 (collection Miss Gertrude Stein, Paris) he had shown three highly recognizable aspects of the poet’s head – from behind, in profile and full-face – by presenting them in successive planes, using a minimum of distortion except in the common line of the hair which serves for two of the heads. Some years later Salvador Dali was to adopt the latter device in double portraits of himself and his wife.”  (Gertrude Stein wrote of the artist and that painting in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas “The young Russian [sic!] was interesting. He was painting ,so he said, colour that was no colour, he was painting blue pictures and he was painting three heads in one. Picasso had been drawing three heads in one. Soon the Russian was painting three figures in one.” See also an interview by Charles Henry Ford, connecting these three persons together – Gertrude Stein, Pave Tchelitchew and Rene Crevel http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/ford/interviews.htm) Another (graphical) variant of that portrait had been published in Crevel René “L’Esprit contre la Raison”, Les Cahier du Sud, Marseille, 1927 (illustrated underneath the main one).

 (René Crevel (10 August 1900 – 18 June 1935) was a French writer involved with the surrealist movement. Crevel was born in Paris to a family of Parisian bourgeoisie. He had a traumatic religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself. Crevel studied English at the University of Paris. He met André Breton and joined the surrealist movement in 1921, from which he would be excluded in October 1923 due to Crevel's homosexuality and Breton's belief that the movement had been corrupted. During this period, Crevel wrote novels such as Mon corps et moi ("My Body and Me"). In 1926, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis which made him start using morphine. The 1929 exile of Léon Trotsky persuaded him to rejoin the surrealists. Remaining faithful to André Breton, he struggled to bring communists and surrealists closer together. Much of Crevel's work deals with his inner turmoil at being bisexual. Crevel killed himself by turning on the gas on his kitchen stove the night of 18 June 1935, several weeks before his 35th birthday. There were at least two direct reasons: (1) There was a conflict between Breton and Ilya Ehrenburg during the first "International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture" which opened in Paris in June 1935. Breton, who like all fellow surrealists, had been insulted by Ehrenburg in a pamphlet which said – among other things – that surrealists were pederasts, slapped Ehrenburg several times on the street, which led to surrealists being expelled from the Congress. Crevel, who according to Salvador Dalí, was "the only serious communist among surrealists" ^[ (and was facing more and more solitude as the real face of Soviet socialism started to occur), spent a whole day trying to persuade the other delegates to allow surrealists back, but he was not successful and left the Congress at 11pm, totally exhausted. (2) Crevel reportedly had learned that he suffered from renal tuberculosis right upon leaving the Congress (Claude Courtot). He left a note which read "Please cremate my body. Loathing." It should be remembered that when André Breton included the question "Suicide: Is It a Solution?" in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste in 1925, Crevel was one of those who answered "Yes". He wrote "It is most probably the most correct and most ultimate solution.")   

Scull. Dated 1955 and signed up right Mixed media on paper,  10 x 15".

ITEM #TCHOA7d
$10000

DAVID AND GOLIATH – initial draft for the painting (shown on the right image)with the same title.Signed P. Tchelitchew (lower right), signed Pavlik, dated 1942 and inscribed to Ruth a memory of David and Goliath (lower left)

TCHAIKOWSKI Signed P. Tchelitchew and dated 1949 VIII (lower left) Pastel and pencil on paper 30.5 by 22.2 cm. PROVENANCE Durlacher Bros., New York 
The Estate of Barbara Wescott, Rosemont, New Jersey  Sale: Sotheby's New York, June 23, 1982, lot 146

Sothebys Sale: N08747  |  Location: New York Auction Dates: Session 2: Wed, 16 Mar 11 lot 185

EXHIBITED New York, Gallery of Modern Art, Pavel Tchelitchew, 1964, no. 301                    

{ Barbara Harrison [later Wescott] and Monroe Wheeler established a fine press Harrison of Paris  in Paris in 1930 . It published A Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers by Glenway Wescott, with illustrations by Pavel Tchelitchew  in 1932 }

COSTUME DESIGN FOR "ORPHEUS"

Signed P. Tchelitchew and dated 36 (upper left) Ink, wash and gouache on paper 43.5 by 20.9 cm.

PAIR OF THEATRICAL COSTUMES
a) Costume design for the Shemakhan  Princess. Gouache and gold paint on paper. Signed on the back, low right. Executed for Le Coq d'Or in 1923. 20 x 13". Exhibited: London, 1976. R. Nathanson, Alpine club-illustrated  #51 on p. 33 of the catalog; Provenance: Sotheby’s. Dance, Theater, Opera and Music Hall. New York,23.04.1986. Lot 30; Christie's. South Kensington. Twentieth century art. 07.12.98. lot 62. Exhibited: “A World of Stage”, April- October2007, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Japan (illustrated in the catalog)

b).Costume design for baba Babariha, Coq d’Or, signed in Russian, dated 1923 and inscribed to the writer Roman Gul “Милому Роману Гулю в воспоминание весны прошлого года Пав. Челищев 1923 VI”. Gouache, silver paint and collage on paper. 20 x 14". Provenance: Sotheby’s. European and American Paintings, drawings and sculpture. 06.28.2000  lo1 88.      Exhibited: “A World of Stage”, April- October2007, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Japan (illustrated in the catalog)                                                                       

ITEM #TCHOA7f
PRICE on request