Tchelischev Pavel Fedorovich

Russian artist, representative of surrealism, set designer. Born on the Dubrovka estate (Kaluga province) on September 21 (October 3) 1898 in the family of a landowner. In 1918 he left with his family to Kiev, where he studied at the studio of A.A. Ekster and the newly created Ukrainian Academy of Arts. Participated in the festive decoration of the city under the Bolsheviks, performed his first theatrical work (scenery and costumes for the operetta Geisha S. Jones and I. Karil for the theater K. A. Mardzhanov; 1919), in the same year he served as a cartographer in the White Army. In 1920 he was evacuated to Constantinople, lived for a short time in Sofia, where he painted the cover of the first collection of the Eurasians (Exodus to the East, 1921). In Berlin he collaborated with the ballet "Russian Romantic Theater" B. G. Romanov and other troupes (from 1921), then settled in Paris (1924). In 1934-1939 he lived in New York. Together with K. Berar and brothers E.G. and LG Bermanami formed a group of "neo-romanticists" (since 1925), representing the moderate and, as it were, a more aesthetic wing of surrealism, avoiding social shocking in the spirit of A. Breton and his associates. He worked more and more for the theater, especially often designing the performances of G. Balanchine: the ballets The Wanderer to the music of F. Schubert at the Theater of Champs Elysees, 1933; Orpheus to music by K.V. Gluck at the New York Metropolitan Opera, 1937; Apollo Musaget and Balustrade by I.F. Stravinsky at the Teatro Colon (Buenos Aires, 1940) and others. The surreal color-light effects and anamorphoses (i.e., visual transformations of one image into another) characteristic of these performances were simultaneously embodied in the easel painting and graphics of Chelishchev, where the occult-symbolic motives of alchemy and astrology took an important place. The results of his interwar searches were two large paintings: The Phenomenon (Phenomenon, 1936-1938), which the master presented to the Tretyakov Gallery, and The Game of Hide and Seek (1940-1942, Museum of Modern Art, New York); in them, the concept of an “inner landscape” was gradually formed, opening through the outer surface of things - as if in “fluoroscopic” artistic intuition. Returning to Europe, he lived in Italy (since 1949). In the late period, the anatomical and landscape motifs of his "internal landscapes" were increasingly replaced by abstract "cosmic" patterns.