Pavel Tchelitchew. Hide-and-Seek. Derby, Vermont and New York, June 1940 – June 1942 | MoMA
There’s a painting at MoMA that people either walk past without stopping or stand in front of for twenty minutes. Hide and Seek, sometimes called Cache-Cache, is ostensibly a tree. Then the children’s faces emerge from the leaves. Then the hand. Then the veins. Then, if you stay long enough, a fetus at the root. The longer you look, the more is revealed, and there’s something almost confrontational about that — as if the painting is testing your patience, or your willingness to look closely at things that aren’t immediately obvious.
This was Pavel Tchelitchew’s whole method. And it’s worth considering how much of that was personal.
Exile, Survival, and the Uses of Ambiguity
Born in 1898 into an aristocratic Russian family near Kaluga, Tchelitchew fled after the Revolution of 1917, moving through Kiev, where he studied under the pioneering constructivist Aleksandra Ekster, then to Istanbul, then Berlin. He was in his early twenties. His family’s estate was gone, his country was gone, the world he’d grown up in was simply over. He arrived in Berlin in the early 1920s with talent and nothing much else.
It was in Berlin that he met Allen Tanner, an American pianist. The two became lovers and moved to Paris together in 1923, where Tchelitchew began painting portraits of, in one description that pleased him, “the avant-garde and homosexual elite.” That phrase is worth pausing over. It wasn’t shameful or whispered — it was just accurate. He was openly gay in the only milieu that would have him, and that milieu happened to be the most exciting artistic scene in the world.
Gertrude Stein spotted his work at the 1925 Salon d’Automne. Through her, he was introduced to the Sitwell family, and through Edith Sitwell he found his first great champion and publicist, a relationship that would last the rest of his life. Sitwell arranged his London exhibition at the Claridge Gallery in 1928, drummed up press coverage, and had his portrait used as the frontispiece of her Collected Poems. Tchelitchew painted six major portraits of Sitwell. She was not gay, but she was odd, eccentric, fiercely protective of her artistic circle, and constitutionally uninterested in bourgeois approval. For Tchelitchew, still making his way in exile, these were the right friends to have.
There’s something worth naming here about what it meant to be an openly gay artist (and set and costume designer) in this world. Paris in the 1920s and 30s was relatively tolerant, at least in the circles Tchelitchew moved in. Being gay was not, in that milieu, a secret or a scandal. It was part of the texture of his social life. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas were the most famous same-sex couple in Paris. Diaghilev’s entire Ballets Russes was saturated with queer energy — Nijinsky, Cocteau, Lifar. When Tchelitchew designed sets for Diaghilev’s Ode in 1928, he was working inside a queer artistic institution that had essentially created the modern idea of the avant-garde. This wasn’t incidental. It was the environment that made his career possible.
Charles Henri Ford, and What Twenty-Three Years Looks Like
In 1933, a 25-year-old poet from Mississippi named Charles Henri Ford arrived in Paris to publish The Young and Evil, a novel so explicitly about gay life in Greenwich Village that it was immediately banned in England and the United States. Djuna Barnes introduced him to Tchelitchew. Whatever was between Allen Tanner and Tchelitchew — twelve years together, a move across Europe, shared poverty and shared ambition — it didn’t survive 1934. Tchelitchew left Tanner and moved to New York with Ford, a decision that caused real pain and drew real criticism from friends on both sides.
What Tchelitchew and Ford had lasted until Tchelitchew’s death in 1957. That’s twenty-three years. They weren’t always easy together — Ford’s diaries at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin are full of friction, creative differences, the ordinary difficulties of two ambitious people sharing a life. But Ford was there at the end. Tchelitchew died in Grottaferrata, Italy on July 31, 1957, with Ford by his bedside. He is buried at Père Lachaise in Paris, the cemetery that has become, among other things, a site of LGBTQ pilgrimage — Oscar Wilde a few hundred metres away.
What Ford and Tchelitchew built together in New York in the late 1930s and 1940s was a genuine cultural hub. Their apartment at the Dakota became the site of weekly salons — modelled on Stein’s Paris gatherings — that at their peak drew Salvador Dalí, Carl Van Vechten, William Carlos Williams, John Huston, and Virgil Thomson. Patti Smith wrote in Just Kids that by the time she attended in the 1970s, the salon had lost its earlier intensity. Which means the intensity was real, and earlier.
Ford also edited View, the surrealist magazine, from 1940 to 1947, with Tchelitchew providing illustrations. The magazine published E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Kenneth Burke, and Joseph Cornell, and devoted individual issues to Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy. It was the primary vehicle through which European surrealism reached American audiences. The partnership between the painter and the editor wasn’t just domestic — it was cultural infrastructure.
The Queer Social World and What It Made Possible
It’s worth being specific about the network Tchelitchew moved in, because it wasn’t just background colour. It was actively productive.
Lincoln Kirstein — co-founder of the New York City Ballet and one of the most important cultural figures in 20th-century America — was Tchelitchew’s greatest patron and a gay man himself. Kirstein’s letters to Tchelitchew are described as “unusually candid” and “astonishingly acid” about the international set of gay artists who made up his circle, which included Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Philip Johnson, Glenway Wescott, E.M. Forster, George Platt Lynes, Romaine Brooks, Virgil Thomson, and painters George Tooker, Jared French, and Paul Cadmus. This was not a closeted world. It was a richly, densely queer world with enormous institutional power — the ballet, the museums, the magazines, the publishing houses.
Kirstein commissioned and purchased Tchelitchew’s work, advocated for him, and included him in the cultural institutions he was building. Without Kirstein, it’s genuinely unclear whether Hide and Seek would have ended up at MoMA. The queer network wasn’t just social sustenance — it was the patronage system.
George Balanchine, with whom Tchelitchew collaborated on multiple productions, was straight, but the ballet world he and Kirstein built was thoroughly queer-adjacent, and Tchelitchew’s set designs were central to its visual identity in the 1930s and 40s. Tchelitchew designed Errante (1933), Orpheus at the Metropolitan Opera (1937), Balustrade (1941, to Stravinsky), and others. He was one of the most innovative stage designers of the period. The three-dimensionality, the layering of image and form — the same sensibility that appears in his paintings shows up in his theatre work.
The Body as Secret
Here is where the LGBTQ reading of Tchelitchew’s work becomes impossible to separate from the work itself.
His most distinctive method — the “simultaneous image,” the hidden face in the landscape, the body dissolved into nature — has an obvious biographical resonance for a gay man who spent most of his life in a world where visibility was conditional. The faces in Hide and Seek are present and absent at the same time, depending on how long you look and where. The children’s bodies merge with the tree. The veins become branches. Something is always there to be found, if you know to look.
The “x-ray” paintings of his final decade take this further. In his Interior Landscapes, Tchelitchew attempted to see the human form “as in a crystal transparent vase,” permitting “a coming and going — the beginning and pulsation of the life of the object.” The exterior made transparent. The inside revealed. You could read this as purely metaphysical — Tchelitchew was interested in mysticism and theosophy, in ideas of inner and outer reality that ran through his whole career. But you can also read it as a gay man making art about concealment and disclosure, about bodies that contain more than they show, about the work of really seeing another person.
Phenomena (1936–38) is the most legible record of his actual social world. At nine feet wide, it’s a circus-portrait-gallery of his circle: Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Leonor Fini, Charles Henri Ford dissolving “in an opiate red heat generated by poppies and passion,” and Lincoln Kirstein rendered as three simultaneous personalities — businessman, nude athlete, and magician. Nicholas Magallanes, a dancer who was also Tchelitchew’s model and close friend, appears as a nude figure. The whole painting is a portrait of a queer social world, depicted with surrealist strangeness but also with obvious intimacy. These are people he knew and loved and found beautiful and strange.
The painting’s journey is its own kind of story. Tchelitchew willed it to the Soviet Union, and it was smuggled into Russia in 1958, rolled up and hidden in the scenery of Balanchine’s touring ballet company. The Tretyakov Gallery received it — and then kept it in storage for almost forty years before showing it publicly in 1990. A painting full of queer figures, hidden in official storage, finally disclosed. The metaphor is almost too neat.
Decline and the Problem of Taste
Tchelitchew’s reputation collapsed rather spectacularly in the 1950s, and the reasons say something uncomfortable about the art world.
The critic Clement Greenberg reviewed Tchelitchew’s 1942 MoMA retrospective and claimed his latest paintings set “a new high in vulgarity.” As Abstract Expressionism rose, figurative work fell. The art world that had championed Pollock and de Kooning had no place for a Russian émigré mystic painting translucent heads full of glowing veins. Tchelitchew became, in the phrase of one observer, “forbidden fruit.” His work was too decorative, too theatrical, too invested in the human figure, too willing to be beautiful in unfashionable ways.
There’s a reasonable queer reading of this too. The taste-makers who dismissed Tchelitchew were largely setting critical norms around a very particular idea of seriousness — formal, austere, heroically masculine in the abstract-expressionist mode. Tchelitchew’s work is not any of those things. It is flamboyant, layered, emotionally intense, invested in the body, and interested in concealment and disclosure rather than bold gesture. Whether or not that’s why he was dismissed, it’s worth noting that his rehabilitation has partly come from queer art historians and queer contexts: a Loud & Proud: LGBTQ+ Art auction in 2024 included a Study for Hide and Seek as one of its lots.
He became a US citizen in 1952 and moved to Italy with Ford. He died five years later, at 58. He wasn’t old. His late Interior Landscapes were still evolving. It’s hard not to feel that his story was cut off before it finished being told.
Major Works
| Title | Date | Medium | Current Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hide and Seek (Cache-Cache) | 1940–1942 | Oil on canvas | Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York |
| Phenomena | 1936–1938 | Oil on canvas | State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow |
| Portrait of Edith Sitwell (first) | c. 1927 | Oil on canvas | National Portrait Gallery, London |
| Portrait of Gertrude Stein | c. 1930 | Oil on canvas | Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven |
| Portrait of Ruth Ford | c. 1940s | Oil on canvas | Sold at Sotheby’s, April 2010 ($986,500); private collection |
| Fata Morgana | c. 1940s | Oil on canvas | Sold at Sotheby’s Paris, June 2010 (€624,750); private collection |
| Leopard Boy (Portrait of Nicholas Magallanes) | 1935 | Oil on canvas | Private collection (study at The Morgan Library & Museum, New York) |
| Anatomical Head (Interior Landscape series) | c. 1950 | Watercolour on paper | The Morgan Library & Museum, New York |
| Basket of Strawberries | 1925 | Oil on canvas | Private collection (Gertrude Stein’s first Tchelitchew purchase) |
| Stage design for Ode (Diaghilev / Ballets Russes) | 1928 | Design/set | Historical; design materials dispersed in collections |
| Stage design for Errante (Balanchine) | 1933 | Design/set | Historical; design materials held variously |
| Stage design for Balustrade (Balanchine / Stravinsky) | 1941 | Design/set | Historical; drawings and costume designs in institutional collections |
What Gets Remembered, and How
Tchelitchew is still under-discussed. There has been no major museum retrospective since the one mounted in 1998 that Artforum reviewed. His work shows up at auction, in LGBTQ art contexts, in the footnotes of books about Balanchine and Kirstein and Gertrude Stein. He’s a figure people find when they’re looking for someone else.
But Hide and Seek is back on the wall at MoMA, rehung in 2024. It’s behind glass now, which is apparently necessary — the painting has survived a hole being accidentally punched through its canvas and a fire that baked soot onto its surface. It has been restored more than once. Every time someone stands in front of it and waits for the faces to appear, they’re doing what Tchelitchew spent his whole career asking people to do: look longer, look closer, stay with the thing until it opens up.
For a man who spent thirty years as a refugee and an exile, who loved openly in eras and places where that carried real cost, who built the bulk of his artistic life inside a dense queer community that modern art history has been slow to fully account for — there’s something fitting about that. He made art about the rewards of patient looking. About the fact that things conceal themselves not because they don’t want to be found, but because they need you to really want to find them.
Sources and further reading: Pavel Tchelitchew — Wikipedia · Hide-and-Seek — MoMA collection · Allen Tanner collection — Dickinson College Archives · Charles Henri Ford — Harry Ransom Center inventory · Charles Henri Ford — Wikipedia · Phenomena at the Tretyakov — Arthive · Tchelitchew retrospective review — Artforum, 1998 · Lincoln Kirstein and his queer circle — Gay & Lesbian Review · Anatomical Head — The Morgan Library · National Portrait Gallery: Edith Sitwell portrait · 7 Things You Need to Know — Sotheby’s · Queer Places: Pavel Tchelitchew — Elisa Rolle
