Why There Is Why

Holding the first of what it calls Twilight Previews (6 to 8 p.m.), Manhattan's streamlined Museum of Modern Art last week devoted two-thirds of its largest gallery space to Painter Pavel Tchelitchew. The 214 exhibits, hung against a color scheme (each wall a different shade) devised by the artist, formed the biggest retrospective Tchelitchew show ever assembled. The remaining rooms displayed 43 carvings, 25 drawings by American Sculptor John B. Flannagan, who died by suicide last January.

This monumental exhibition represented 17 years of Painter Tchelitchew's work. Chief target of ahs and bahs was the artist's most recent work a 78 1/2 ft.-by-84 3/4 ft. canvas entitled Hide-and-Seek. Some spectators thought it looked like a gigantic omelet composed, not of eggs, but of innumerable infants. Others thought the picture looked like a vast translucent cranium containing a number of babies enveloped in autumn leaves, some of the children still foetal, one blue-veined crimson hydrocephaloid boy on its stomach, another urinating. Persistent spectators sooner or later discovered that Hide-and-Seek was a puzzle picture. What gave form to the whole work was a great gnarled tree, whose branches traced the outlines of a hand, its trunk an immense human foot. Said the creator of this startling canvas: "[Painting] consists in three different subjects happening in three separate moments of time and seen from three points of view which must correspond to the three levels of perspective. . . ."

The inspiration for puzzle pictures came to Painter Tchelitchew during the summer of 1940 in Vermont. Almost as exciting to gallery-goers as Hide-and-Seek was David and Goliath, just completed. The picture appears to be a highly colored masterly rendering of Vermont in autumn. But ingeniously concealed in the background is the head of Goliath. A tree contains the figure of David. Other outstanding items in the show: a brilliant portrait of Poet Charles Henri Ford with its exquisite hands; an original gouache of Helena Rubinstein, her face covered in sequins and lighted from the front by a splash of phosphorus; a colossal Phenomena, a hodgepodge of bodies with the focus on feet and midsections, which stunned New York and London in 1938.

Born in Moscow in 1898 of wealthy, aristocratic parents, Painter Tchelitchew fled from the Russian Revolution in 1918. In Berlin Tchelitchew was encouraged by renowned Ballet Master Sergei Diaghilev, is now considered "one of the few great stage designers of his period." But Gertrude Stein discovered Tchelitchew as a painter. Explained Miss Stein, after seeing his Basket of Strawberries: "This is why there is no flower this is why there is no flower in color this is why there is why...."

At one time Tchelitchew was influenced by Picasso's Rose Period, assumed the leadership of France's Neo-Romantic group. Later he struck out on his own. Tchelitchew works and talks feverishly (he is a superb conversationalist). There seems to be almost no art he cannot master. This is the source of his strength, and his weakness: for, like a jack-of-all-arts, Tchelitchew lacks the profundity that makes a painter great.

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