Headscapes

Pavel Tchelitchew (pronounced Chell-e-shetf) has painted some strange and wonderful things in his 52 years. Most famous among them have been his bloody, surrealistic congress of freaks called Phenomena and Hide-and-Seek--a vast, autumnal tree with embryos and sick-looking children half hidden among its leaves (TIME, Nov. 9, 1912). Last week Tchelitchew jolted Manhattan's syth Street once more with an exhibition of 50-odd transparent heads.

Some of them were the sort he has been working on for years: textbook-like studies of nerves, bones and blood vessels Others, more recent, turned heads into wire latticework. Done in colored pencil on dark paper, they achieved effects of transparency, roundness and motion in neat, linear arabesques. To Tchelitchew they were not just plays in a clever game but 'work, work, work!"

The stoop-shouldered, cosmopolitan Muscovite, who left Russia in 1920, easily explained how & why he had produced the drawings. "As a youth, taking Leonardo for my model," he began, "I went dutifully to the anatomy theater in Moscow. Later I was found in a dead faint on the pavement outside . . . But Mrs. Nature you can't fool with her. She's a tenacious woman . . . Twenty years later I discovered what a marvelous transparent vessel the human being is--like a crystal jungle. From that time on, I was trapped in interior landscape." He went back and studied anatomy. "Then I came to what I'm doing now . . . I want these heads to be as brilliant as neon lights, to be in the air between you and the black background, like the handwriting at Belshazzar's feast . But these heads are shoots only. What the flower is going to be I'm as much surprised as you."

Reviewing Tchelitchew's new show, one critic brashly suggested that the artist had begun painting transparent heads because of a nervous breakdown, and congratulated him for having learned "to look at nerves, not as a patient, but as an artist." Nonsense, says Tchelitchew. "My nerves are very strong, though I don't know why for I was treated all my life rather badly, by critics especially. My crise de nerfs were microscopical tropical leeches that were exactly eating me to pieces!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.